Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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Since then I have noticed how expressions of care for the environment are often outlets for hatred of other humans, both in the accusation out we that we are bad for other species, in which the accuser rarely seems to understand themselves to be a part of any we, and also in the protection of a privileged experience of greenery over the voices and essential needs of the poorer indigenous and local people. In England, the phrase local people is a byword for a community that is corrupted by its ignorance and incest — not only poor and undereducated, but repellently so. Definitely. What’s admirable about her is that she’s so clearly not interested in that, but just the contents of what she’s saying, how she gets it across. And that’s impressive in anybody, but particularly in such a young person. These are fretful, questioning essays with occasional flashes of beauty, demanding of readers that they think about anthropogenic disruption of climate and ecology. Their structure feels disjointed, and their register wilfully banal, but perhaps their very fragmentation is a comment on modern disconnection and disaffection. They seem to come from a place of perplexity and anguish, bewilderment struggling towards expression. What is problematic about the absent narrator is how this alienates the reader. This may be purposeful on Hildyard's part, a performative palpability intended to convey the awful insularity in our future. Dwindling resources and a ruthless competition to survive have historically had the effect of solidifying boundaries, separating and causing the demise of many millions.

Second Body by Daisy Hildyard review - The Guardian The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard review - The Guardian

This book succeeds because of the chilly and beautifully sustained voice of its narrator, the precise embroidery of its sentences and paragraphs, its observations of the natural world and insistence that there is no distinction between humans and environments.’

For readers of Rachel Cusk and Jenny Odell, a lyrical work of autofiction that explores the dissolution of boundaries between the self and our earth as we head towards ecological catastrophe. But Hildyard’s every portrait of human experience is qualified with a reminder that humans are only one animal species among others, animals only one kind of life-form, and the planet full of things that are vital without being alive. In the first of the memorable vignettes of animal life in this book, Hildyard’s narrator kidnaps a baby rabbit from its mother despite the warnings of grown-ups that “the rabbit would eat her babies if they had a strange smell on them.” The beauty of Emergency is in its attempt to glimpse an expanded paradigm of meaning, which encompasses but isn’t limited to our own.” A quiet, complicated hymn to nature . . . [Emergency] is a novel with an elastic strangeness, gliding seamlessly between the familiar and the surreal . . . In the wake of the biggest natural melodrama of recent times, Emergency is a thoughtful, poised reflection on how much change we humans, among the animals, can ever bring to bear.”

The Royal Society of Literature Reveals Winner of the 2023

The Encore Award was first presented in 1990 to celebrate the achievement of outstanding second novels. The Award fills a niche in the catalogue of literary prizes. The RSL has administered the award since 2016.

I feel slightly indifferent after reading this. I Didnt dislike it but i also didn’t love it. I do however see how Hildyard managed to so delicately weave the past and present so smoothly that sense of time was warped. In a way this warping made it feel more intimate, as if you were in someones mind which is a whole mix match of past and present, memories and the stories we tell ourselves.