Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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Certainly one thing among other things; I wouldn’t say, you know, the novel is going to solve the climate crisis. 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. We watch what happens to a litter of fox cubs during the days after their mother’s disappearance, and then move down to the stream that runs along the hill below their den.

It’s still unusual for an author who is writing on slavery to pay attention to the residence time of sodium in the ocean. It isn’t always possible to see this imprint positively, in the way that you might look out of the window and see a striped beetle or a tree with pale purple flowers, but it is possible to understand that human disaster runs beyond the frame of human experience. 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’. It is told by Lyudmila, who had, at the time of the explosion, recently married Vasily, “Vasya,” a firefighter. 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.Then the animal disappeared from my view, coming up through the ground; meanwhile the kestrel continued to ascend towards the clouds until, abruptly, she stopped. The chronology of this natural history, as it’s told in the book, begins before the human community knew that anything had happened. David Attenborough’s gentle voice describes how, during the years following the evacuation of the area, “the wild has reclaimed the space.

She talks to us about what she’s writing now, how she copes with the enormous responsibility of climate change, and Greta Thunberg. We find ourselves, as Alexievich puts it, “living in one world, while our minds remain stuck in another. But despite my admiration for the chains of renewing energy, a part of me didn’t want to watch the whale’s majestic body being parceled out in units the size of a worm’s bite. The sodium of human blood, her colleague explains, would have a residence time (“the amount of time it takes for a substance to enter the ocean and then leave the ocean”) of 260 million years.

I like to think that I would go mad if I tuned into everything, all the time, the squirrel’s heartbeat or the roar of growing grass…. She pushed and cajoled her way into the building, and inside she found Geiger counters “going berserk. And yet it’s still unusual for any storyteller—historian or novelist—to describe the effects of a war on a particular species of insect.