The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 6 January 2023
by Daisy Hildyard
The COVID-19 global pandemic (which, as of January 2023 is not over) gave many of us a chance, voluntarily or not, to slow down and appreciate the immediate environment around us. It is startlingly vibrant, once you get a good look at it. As a result, there were countless postings about how "nature is healing". The quieter cities suddenly were alive with birdsong and even howling coyotes. Now, a lot of us were not entirely happy about any of this. First of all, so-called "essential" workers were forced to face the chance of infection and go to work anyway. The vital health care and first responders were often heroic in their efforts to stem the tide of infection and death. Some of us were lucky enough to "work from home". Sadly, many were stuck at home and out of work as a result of the pandemic. In any case, there was the opportunity to slow down and to observe in a way that we might not have experienced since we were small children. There was a fair chance that this would provoke much reflection on childhood, too. We don't know when the definitive pandemic novel will appear, but this small intense volume is certainly a good candidate.
Daisy Hildyard has written an intense novel of memory full of vivid sensory descriptions of places, the natural environment, farm life, and, most particularly, the intertwined relationships between human living and the global environmental infrastructure that supports it. Her appreciation of the basic give and take trade between human existence and the uses to which we put the landscape and animal life goes far beyond what we take for granted in our day to day lives. She portrays all of this through the probing eyes of a young girl growing up in a semi-rural village in England. She remarks, from her desk where she writes under pandemic lockdown, for example, upon how the plastic wrappers she and others used when she was a child in the 90s, are still out there, somewhere, littering the roadsides or filling the landfills. This usage endures, and likely lasts beyond a human lifetime. Animals are slaughtered (and we have a character who works in a slaughterhouse) and people variously gloss over the cruelty inherent in the food chain ecosystem. Indeed, our narrator most appreciates those people who have an almost brutally honest view of how we use animals, describing them rather in tonnage of meat instead of individual cows. It is bracing and somewhat jarring to confront Hildyard's view that humans, and somehow most particularly urban liberals, fail to honestly accept the necessarily extractive reality of human existence. The give and take we have a hard time accepting when the give becomes the threat of deadly pandemic, life on hold, lockdown, sickness and death. It's all part of the equation.
The novel reads also as a fictional memoir of being a pre-teen girl in the English countryside. We see her ground-level view of these environmental experiences, as well as many of the small children's interactions in this town, responding to the mysteries of adult behavior. There is a very kid-like viewpoint here, the uncertainties of friendships, the visceral sensuousness of muddy ground, the mysteries of rotting trees and frightening old people. The whole is illuminated by short episodes taken out of any clear chronological order, but linked up to the narrator's experience, gazing from a desk in lockdown, at the apartment block across the street and the implied stories within. The book, as we've said, is intense, dense and vivid. It has its rewards of description and an almost visceral physicality. Worth an attentive read, even as we pretend the pandemic is ending.