Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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Daisy’s first novel, Hunters in the Snow, was published by Jonathan Cape in July 2013, and has been hailed as ‘a remarkably intelligent debut’, a ‘truly dazzling first novel’, and as a book ‘so rich in texture it deserves many re-readings’. Within the passage, heading upwards, there was a small animal – brown and furry, whether it was mouse, a shrew, or a vole, I couldn’t see. Even the faults of language and the volatility of trying to put things into words are flaws to appreciate – I think – in a culture that has a scary love of perfection. Clare wasn’t there, but Nic was sitting on the back step with a mug of tea and a biscuit, one cigarette waiting beside her on the warm brick. I sat outside the hutch and waited for them to be revealed when their mother rolled aside – tiny pink squirming things which were in the process of becoming, from day to day, delicate versions of their parents.

Certainly, there was a vitality to these queer, psychedelic beings and their inventive methods for making new life.Her writing has received awards including a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium (National Book Awards, USA) and a Somerset Maugham Award (Society of Authors, UK).

It can feel impossible, as an individual, to decelerate or exit the systems that make all this happen. But the alternative story that comes out of these carefully verified facts gives a very different impression. I can understand why you would dislike language on these terms, but personally, I’ve never been able to feel it. Inside the silence, he says, we “hear our displacement from the position of auditor: as species we hear what our environment hears—and, in listening for silences in that environment, we hear our own displaced position as auditors within the Anthropocene.They were eaten, organisms processed them, and those organisms were in turn eaten and processed, and the cycle continues. Where he describes how a bomb’s physical effects are held in the atmosphere, Luftkrieg could also be taken to mean war in the air. The worms seemed to have buried themselves much deeper than usual, a good half meter down in the earth.

He includes a grainy photograph of charred black forms on cobblestones, and he also mentions that the lilac and chestnut trees had a second flowering in the spring of 1943. But I’m glad you raise the idea of slow emergencies, as I said above, this is something I was thinking of, in the story, and that I’m still thinking about. For example, the corrosions of a supremacist system that reach through generations, or the deep timescale and microscopic spatial scale of environmental destruction, or the globally distanced exploitation of outsourced labor.

Is this your experience of the world, too, not just your narrator’s, and is this book partly an effort to hold onto that richness of experience in the natural world? I think that making an attempt to respond to these questions with honesty now does involve making some big changes to this story of human nature – an upheaval is happening. Certainly one thing among other things; I wouldn’t say, you know, the novel is going to solve the climate crisis.

I went back to the book to check and found that the title wasn’t Sebald’s phrase—it originated, in fact, not with a literary publication but with a killing campaign.I closed the gate and approached, warily, up the path, until I was in front of her, waiting for a sign that she had recognized me, but she wasn’t much interested in my presence – she was still looking over my shoulder. Daisy Hildyard’s first novel Hunters in the Snow received the Somerset Maugham Award, and her essay The Second Body won The White Review’s Book of The Year 2018. She shows how historical atrocity is a condition of the present: the transatlantic slave trade is animated, today, in oppressive or violent anti-Black laws, systems, and human interactions. This is a heartbeat in comparison with Sharpe’s time frame; the residency time of traces of human blood in the ocean is 260 million years.