HOT TAKE: Emergency by Daisy Hildyard

there is no room for apathy

I could tell you a simple little story about my life. I could tell you the story of my childhood. I could tell you how in the sixth grade, a twenty year flood came in one evening and took with it the last pieces of the hippy diaspora that clung beside this wealthy enclave. The little game and nicknack shop, Dreams, disappeared, along with that one store with sand covering the floor — which I’m not sure was from a dream. Then I could be reminded, through that storm, of the funny shop that my dad’s friend owned — an antique shop called Second Hand Land that sold first and second pressings of Jimi Hendrix Vinyls beside neon lighting, and clown memorabilia from the seventies and eighties. Walking around there, though I hardly remember us ever buying anything, was like walking through the most well curated trash pile I’d ever found. A good antique shop should be like that, I’ve come to realize.

I then can move on from that to my father’s relationship with the town, how friendly he was and how, walking there with him we would often talk with three or four people along the way. Sometimes I found his joviality with these acquaintances odd, but I won’t tell you specifically why. I’ll just let it sit there, and move on with the story. Or at least the rambling. 

I could tell you all this, and you would know, on some level, that this was a beautiful and rich telling that began at a quarry — I mean flood — and that it must, in some sense relate to the loss of that place. But I won’t tell you it is sad because I’ve deemed reality in and of itself too subjective a thing, humanity and my perspective of it too made-up a concept as to try and claim that the death or dying of this place, or even the climate, is really a bad thing or not. I think it’s bad, but I won’t fight if you disagree. This is, at least structurally, the novel Emergency by the fascinating Daisy Hildyard

In a sense, Emergency, which attempts and succeeds to conjure this spell of recollection, loses itself by not necessarily taking a stance on these tragedies. However, what makes this novel rise out above the din of climate crisis novels is the humanity and character with which Hildyard conveys everything, from the tragedy of the foxes, to the forceful individuality of an untamed cow.

“Ivy was unlike the other cows. She was no good at living in a state of calm order and she liked to watch things, including me, with her catlike eyes…She sought attention from her own kind, often desperately, though it wasn’t the kind of attention you’d want.” 

There are even smart and beautiful lines in this wandering narrative that push the readers to consider the climate crisis:

“But there is only one Earth Song and it is a weird and messy song of abusers who are also victims, ignorant schoolchildren, bewildered adults, money, common people, a humpback whale, an emaciated baby, a bird’s egg, music executives, domineering fathers, a lynx’s intent eyes, a genius, a bacterium, and a forest on fire.”

However there is little hope, little action or declaration, and the only way one, as a reader, could make the jump from this small British town story to the climate crisis is through an already rich and well-read concern for the environment and the narratives that instruct its world. This makes Emergency, like Jenny Offill’s Weather, another postmodernist novel that, due to its unwillingness to take a stance, or even lay claim that it is purely observational, pushes away the beauty of insight that stories may glean for us, especially in times of uncertainty.

Stories are either observations of a reality in a certain point of time, or some sort of declaration about that same moment. That’s painting with a broad brush but I’m writing for twelve people and I’m not writing a book on rhetoric, so give me my hot take. Emergency toes the line between both without clarifying which we are in. It’s a  long rambling of the narrators past while they write during the lockdown of the Pandemic, along with the narrator’s beautiful remarks on our world and its changing cultural and physical features is truly impeccable from the perspective of craft, but it never makes me certain if it is just a reflection of the past in a time of crisis, or if it is a statement on the passive crisis of the climate and the pandemic. And it does little, in that way, to really showcase the tragedy of living in this moment, and what that living is like, how truly terrifying all this uncertainty is for us.

Where the novel really succeeds is in the small moments where the narrator steps into the present and tells us about lockdown. 

“The woman sat at her sewing machine. She was wearing her glasses and a fluffy pale pink dressing gown. I could hear the machine whirring. When the woman finished her work the sound died away. In that moment, I closed my window and it  gave a clunk that rang out across the quiet neighborhood.”

Beyond that, you can reflect on what the world was like “way back when” and what it was like to play when you had no phones to text each other as eight year olds, and for that it does nothing except reflect on the stark differences of childhood today — a time when it seems youth itself is dying due to all the crises we as humans have brought onto ourselves and the planet.

I think this book does a good job in making us wonder what the fuck is going on. Through that, with either frustration or glee as a reader, we can find what we personally desire from these trying times without ever knowing if what is happening to the narrator’s childhood or present is inherently good or bad, and how we might change due to it.

I think these days there is no room for apathy.

But, then again, though I clearly found the rhetoric frustrating and the story absolutely beautiful, maybe I’m too dumb to piece together the novel. Maybe it’s simply a pastoral novel for the modern era—one simple portrait which is never truly never enough to understand everything from. Maybe I want this novel to do so much more because, like I’ve said, it’s so damn beautiful. Maybe my own maybes are an annoying postmodernist rhetorical copout, my own way to avoid a declaration of certainty when I know how I feel about this novel — frustrated. But, I don’t know how you are going to feel about it. And for some reason, for you, I am trying to assuage my claim. Sort of.