Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

Product Information

I’ve found myself really interested in how that technology affects the way the analysts look at these occurrences… Their feelings about it.

Because nutrients cycle through the ocean (the process of organisms eating organisms is the cycling of nutrients through the ocean), the atoms of those people who were thrown overboard are out there in the ocean even today.So, Emergency is a digressive novel which tells different stories about many characters (human and nonhuman), but each story takes off from a physical meeting. But what do “near” and “far” actually mean after Chernobyl, when, by day four, the fallout clouds were drifting above Africa and China? She invites her marine geologist colleague to explain the ecological legacy of these drowned bodies. Its prose is bewitching and uncompromising, alive to the enmeshing of cruelty with care that articulates our shared – human and nonhuman – existence.

Chernobyl has been here since 1986, it is here today, and it will extend into the deep future, long after Alexievich and all her subjects and all her readers have gone. 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. We find ourselves, as Alexievich puts it, “living in one world, while our minds remain stuck in another. We had the chance to sit down with her recently and talk about the novel and the role of art in the midst of crisis. Daisy Hildyard is the author of the novels Emergency and Hunters in the Snow, which received the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards.Any ecology of human history exists at scales so far above and below human life that its operations are silent to us. Holding my gaze on her I rose slowly and as smoothly as I could, and skirted along the track that ran around the quarry at the top, taking care to make no sudden movement and to give the bird a wide berth so that she didn’t flit. In 1997, the year that Sebald delivered his lectures, Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich published Chernobyl Prayer (released in the US as Voices from Chernobyl), a tale of over fifty million radionuclides. I wonder whether and how much others felt that, in isolation: a powerful sense of entanglement or that the world outside was extra vivid. This story is narrowly individualist and self-focused, distinguished by separation from nature nature, and many of our stories are hung up on it, but it just isn’t up to the task of exploring what a human life is right now.