Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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When he moves on he leaves behind an empty plastic noodle pot and we stay with that for a while… I imagined that over time, a picture of the area, and its workings, energy, and relationships, would emerge.

He went into libraries and archives to study photographs and contemporary accounts of the Allied bombing campaigns from the perspective of Germans on the ground.They have different causes, victims, and legacies, and each author is concerned with a distinct subject. How does the path of your career, or your money troubles, or the shape of your family, or the state of your marriage, affect the nature of your world? From the track I could see the animal again – a large vole, male, hiding under a clump of dead turf that overhung the track.

I don’t know much else about the book, but it opens on a high floor of an office tower in central London in the early hours of a Sunday morning. Bodies starve for breath underwater and melt in extraordinary heat; chromosomes are pulled apart by radiation. I’ve found myself really interested in how that technology affects the way the analysts look at these occurrences… Their feelings about it. There was a small yellowish scar below the outer edge of one of her eyes which very slightly affected its shape, so there was always something unusual about her face, but in that moment she was looking towards the sun and her brown iris seemed to have been set on fire, melting diamonds of golds and oranges wheeling around the rim, which gave her a blind, illuminated fierceness, and I felt afraid of her.

Her essay The Second Body, a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. The worms seemed to have buried themselves much deeper than usual, a good half meter down in the earth. So for the essay, I’ve been speaking with people who monitor conflict in the environment, analysts or people who works for NGOs, who use very complex satellite technologies to look at landscapes from a distance and try to work out what’s happening in them. My novel Emergency is not about the climate crisis in the way you may think about it – as some kind of fireball, flash flood or disaster, but told through stories about humans and animals in a small area of rural Yorkshire. This is not a book about Chernobyl as a localized geography, but a book “on the world of Chernobyl,” in the sense that the physical effects of the disaster have extended across the planet, altering the experience of time and space.

Hildyard’s feat has been to create a novel that presents itself not as a story but as a complex ecosystem. It provokes questions about appropriation and the value of speculation, but it’s also uncomfortable because it makes the human figure look so small. And so he didn’t—couldn’t—mention the glaring fact that everything we watched (the slender birches, the horses playing, the elk picking a new pathway across a disused railway line) was irradiated. 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.After they left, the footage showed spider crabs and rock crabs creeping out over the corpse, which had, in the still water, taken on a strangely woolly appearance. The most striking change on the ground was observed in the populations of parasitic creatures who thrive on unburied bodies: “‘Rats and flies’ … the multiplication of species that are usually suppressed in every possible way.

I pay a bit more attention to animals, I’m just more aware of their worlds going on around my world.

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. Not only in this sort of nature – scenes of cows and trees in a landscape – but also inside my flat or whatever. She pushed and cajoled her way into the building, and inside she found Geiger counters “going berserk.