In the fourth and final essay of The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard describes winter floods inundating her house in Yorkshire. She didn’t have any home insurance. “There had been two false alarms that year … We’d been told that the water would come into our house at 4.2 metres, but when the levels got to 4.3 in early December, we were still dry.” She and her husband were in receipt of automated telephone calls whenever the rain started to fall – a computerised female voice would predict the height the river might reach. “When it rains she rings up all the time,” she explains; “you stop picking up to her.” They went away with their young daughter for a few days over the Christmas holidays, and when they came back, the river was lapping near their ceilings. “Before we went away we moved all our things a few inches off the ground, emptied the bottom drawers, and piled everything on to the second shelf up. This was one of the most pointless things I have ever done.”
After the flood receded, neighbours and strangers gave up their Christmas holiday time to help her hose out sediment and clean up. “I became a designated Victim with an assigned caseworker and my own reference number at the food bank.” During the flood her father had swum out to the house to gather paperwork; as she laid out the papers to dry, passers-by took pictures of her with their phones. A reporter hoping to interview her feigned pity, and on the television she saw aerial footage of her street. “The flood looked very small. It wasn’t like that on the ground where it was everywhere.” She found catharsis in throwing away many of her possessions – a catharsis that expressed itself physically: “The sense of relief was located in my spine, it felt as if my vertebrae were spacing themselves further out, as if my body was growing longer and more loose.”
Her in-laws live in Birmingham; she and her husband took turns driving between there, to spend time with their daughter, and alone in Yorkshire cleaning the house of slime and sewage. “In spite of all the help that was offered, nobody offered to help in such a way that would allow us to keep our family together, which was all I thought I wanted at the time.”
The premise of The Second Body is that all human beings have two bodies – the one they have immediate autonomy over, made of flesh and bone, and another which is more diffuse. Hildyard struggles to define exactly what she means by the second body, but in one place calls it “the global presence of the individual body”. Elsewhere it is imagined as an entity shared and distributed across every aspect of the biosphere impacted on by humans. The flood was part of this second body – an elemental retribution brought about not just by her, but by all the collective bad decisions of Homo sapiens: “My second body came to find my first body when the river flooded my house.”
Hildyard has taught Shakespeare at university level; in order to make sense of her experience she turns to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. “He asks: what happens to a human from whom everything beyond his body has been taken away?” Shylock’s experience of destitution is to fall back on the carnal aspects of his humanity (“If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”). She explicitly compares Shylock’s perspective to that of Nina Simone when, after listing everything she doesn’t have in “Ain’t Got No – I Got Life” (home, shoes, money, cigarettes), Simone proclaims and celebrates all her body parts (hair, brains, tongue, boobs). “Shylock and Nina Simone cannot speak directly about what it is to be a living human now. What was interesting to me was that they shared a vision of an individual body that was very personal, but also overpopulated with other people’s organs – this was how it seemed to me. I thought that other people acted as if that was not the case: as if their organs, and their bodies, were somehow different from those that were all around them.”
Hildyard and her husband were awarded compensation by the government, which she used to take a cheap flight to a Mediterranean island with her daughter (“In a technical way I believe in climate change, but I do not much act as if I do … I didn’t want to spend this money on more things”). Walking in the warm evening air she comes upon beached lifeboats, an immigration Portakabin, some Red Cross tents and “a queue of humans, some wearing blankets, waiting to be seen”. The connection is left implicit between her own experience, internally displaced by climate change, and that of migrants on the Mediterranean beach.
I have concentrated on Hildyard’s final essay because it’s there that her themes cohere most convincingly, and her writing is most compelling. The first three essays describe encounters with animals alive and dead, and with scientists who make sense of life. There’s a convalescence story of an injured pigeon that she later describes as a pet, a visit to a butcher called Richard and a conversation with Gina, an American zookeeper turned prison officer turned investigator of environmental offences (such as the smuggling of exotic animals as pets, and the slaughter of orangutans to clear forest for palm oil plantations).
In Jena, near Leipzig, Hildyard seeks out the advice of three academic biologists – Luis, Nadezhda and Paul. Nadezhda teaches her about fungi, Luis about the origin of life. He is described as knowing more than Hildyard about almost everything, but she is puzzled by his optimism about the future of humanity, and discomfited when he explains that the definition of life is open to debate: “Stop,” I said. “You don’t actually know what life is? ... You need to get your act together.”
These are fretful, questioning essays with occasional flashes of beauty, demanding of readers that they think about anthropogenic disruption of climate and ecology. Their structure feels disjointed, and their register wilfully banal, but perhaps their very fragmentation is a comment on modern disconnection and disaffection. They seem to come from a place of perplexity and anguish, bewilderment struggling towards expression.
“When Hamlet, Macbeth and Lear die … they repeat themselves increasingly until they make funny sounds,” Hildyard writes towards the end of the book. She uses the example of King Lear: “Howl, howl, howl, howl! It is not clear whether this is a noise or a command.”
• Gavin Francis’s Adventures in Human Being is published by Profile/Wellcome.
• The Second Body is published by Fitzcarraldo. To order a copy for £9.34 (RRP £10.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
