Daily Hildyard’s new work of fiction, her second, after Hunters in the Snow (2013), is advertised as a reinvention of the “pastoral novel for the climate change era”. Its title alludes of course to climate, but also to other crises, of which the pandemic is the most obvious. The book is framed as the recollections of its narrator during the early days of the first quarantine, looking back at a childhood spent in the early 1990s in rural Yorkshire.
The book appears in the austerely handsome dark blue jacket of its publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions. Seasoned readers of books from their catalogue will know to expect something difficult, a little odd. Emergency is odd indeed. There are stories, or more fairly, episodes, in this book, but no plot. Human feelings and dramas are alluded to, but never occupy the page long. The joins are barely visible, the transitions opaque. Emergency contains much that is admirable, but it is, perhaps by design, a hard book to like.
The critic William Empson influentially proposed that the “pastoral” as a literary form had a tension at its heart: it was about the people without being by or for them. Its tendency to idealise country life, country ways, country people, came in part from the fact that writers of pastoral wrote at one remove from the worlds they sought to evoke.
Hildyard has evidently lived away from North Yorkshire and is at ease in a cosmopolitan world of letters. But her writing places no distance between herself and the landscape of her childhood, in which she has returned to live in adulthood. Nothing is idealised here, nothing idyllic. The countryside is where people live and work and die, hardy but vulnerable. A quarry at the edge of her village stands for the vulnerability of the village community to the winds of the international economy, the quarry’s size determined by “the requirements of Norwegian motorways and new cities in China”.
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 next day, having been admonished and returned the baby to its mother, she watches the mother rabbit chillingly “alone in her run”. “We had done it together,” she says, “destroyed the babies with our colossal care.” She feels a strong affinity for the rabbit: “principles and will… (memory, love), are not exclusively human traits”. “All creatures”, she continues, “have character.”
That sentence comes close to being the book’s motto. There is a cow called Ivy, “an attention-seeker and a troublemaker”, a bull called “49327100 G-R-A-Y” with the charisma of a born leader, and a dog called Soldier, her underbelly “bald and mottled brown and purple, with swollen teats”. The kitchen houses a spider, “elegant – long-legged, with a body tapered like a teardrop”, the hedge nearby a clever nesting lapwing “sensing things in ways I cannot reach”.
Nature is allowed to retain its mystery, its menace, and its indifference. Hildyard describes, in a virtuoso passage of attentive description that lasts three gripping pages, an interaction between three hares that could be a game, a dance, a duel or a mating ritual. “His pointed face fitted perfectly into the bend of the nape of her neck. She was very still. Then he began to shiver violently and I turned my head aside, out of some sense of respect which meant nothing to them.” A moment later, the rutting animals are quietly grazing again.
Hildyard doesn’t offer the narratives of therapy, social criticism or self-development to be found in other English pastoralists (Helen Macdonald, Ronald Blythe or Adrian Bell). Her style is more reminiscent of such contemporary poets as Kathleen Jamie and Alice Oswald, with their quiet and attentive watchfulness to a non-human reality they only half-understand. Her prose calls for, and frequently earns, the same respectful attentiveness from its readers.
Emergency is published by Fitzcarraldo at £12.99. To order your copy for £10.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
