Reviewed by Olivia Heal

“I was raised in rural Yorkshire … I still have a deep feeling, which dates from my childhood, that you shouldn’t waste anything, especially words”—the matter-of-fact tone set by this phrase from Daisy Hildyard’s previous Fitzcarraldo-published book, The Second Body, glides, or say, steps into her latest, the novel Emergency. Words aren’t the subject here, but rather what they point at. Language is like glass, meant only for seeing through, for designating what is on the far side. The style recalls earlier modes of signifying: the tree is the tree. Simply that, without complication, complexity, or nuance. It’s an illusion, of course, that the world can be transcribed in words, but the mimetic writing here is convincing enough to persuade that this world is the world. As John Berger might have put it, each lion is Lion, each ox is Ox. Or indeed, in current terms it might be called phenomenological writing: descriptive, attentive, making an experience of engaging directly with the world available to its reader. And as with glass, the effect is of seeing more clearly than with the unframed and unfiltered point of view, than with the bare, the illiterate eye.