Carys Davies’ latest novel, Clear, is set during the Scottish Clearances that occurred between 1750 and 1860. This was a time when landlords evicted tenant farmers on the Highlands and islands in an effort to seek larger incomes from pastoral farms. For example, sheep farms could exact higher rents for the landlords than the tenant farms. The displaced were, by necessity, relegated to new roles away from the homes they knew. In the later years of this period, tenants were taken from the land or forced to emigrate.
Davies’ story includes an unforgettable cast of characters that play out a unique fictitious version of this history. As the establishment of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843 also intersects with the other events at this time, her protagonist, Reverend John Ferguson, breaks away from the Church of Scotland—thereby joining other ministers who objected to the practices of the time where wealthy landowners could appoint their church ministers.
He is then in need of money and undertakes an assignment that might provide enough funds for him to start his own ministry.
He has a wife named Mary. She is a shy, slight woman who wears false teeth. With her hesitant blessing, John Ferguson accepts one of these land-clearing assignments on a remote island located somewhere between Shetland and Norway. The place is inhabited by one single, solitary man named Ivar.
John’s journey by sea is harrowing. He finally ends up in a small shack on the island. He has carried with him a number of supplies in a satchel, a few food items, papers, a framed photo—an Adamson calotype—of Mary. One other item is a pistol.
Already, then, from this early point in the story, there is tension. John knows that the reclusive man he is there to confront and evict is imposing and perhaps even uncivilized. There is worry that the man will become violent over having to leave the place he has known his entire life, the place where his mother and brothers—now dead—once lived, too. But the larger suspense comes from what happens next.
When he first arrives on the island, while out for a walk, John takes a terrible fall off a cliff.
Ivar finds John, who is severely injured and unconscious. He carries him and as many possessions as he can find back to his small cabin.
One thing Ivar finds is the calotype. He is so taken with the feminine image that stares back at him behind the framed glass, that he hides it behind another extremely valuable treasure—a prized blue teapot—in his own little shack.
Clear is a slim novel–almost like a long short story that expands to cover the few weeks that ensue.
The chapters are very short, too, and there are alternating points of view—now John Ferguson, now Ivar, then even Mary. She contextualizes much for us about John’s background, the idiosyncrasies of their union. They are idiosyncrasies that we come to understand, too, as we see John and Ivar establish a friendship that deepens and deepens in that short amount of time—on that island where they spend hours and days and weeks alone together.
What is truly remarkable about this is that these men do not speak the same language.
On Orkney and Shetland, the common language was once Norn. It is now an extinct language, having been replaced by Scots.
Ivar teaches John some Norn words—just so that they can communicate, even chat. They do so with mimes and a lot of pointing and impromptu moments of charades.
Their main lexicon is about the natural world—the flora and fauna, the ocean, the birds, the sky and the weather.
Davies provides a helpful author’s note and glossary at the end of the book, and we learn about the historical events that inspired this novel. Another rich source of inspiration for Davies was a copy of Jakob Jakobsen’s Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland.
John Ferguson lost many things in the treacherous, watery journey he undertook to get to the island—including a work-in-progress he had started regarding the Gospels (a translation into Scots). However, the new language he is learning is one that takes over his life and his thinking.
We know that John must find the words to tell Ivar why he is really there on that desolate island, what he has really come for.
Meanwhile, Mary boards the ship that returns to the island to retrieve her husband and its last reclusive resident. Her framed photo becomes as Chekhovian as the pistol among John’s belongings.
We have seen by now how both men are taken with the image of Mary. However, we also see how when one man takes his leave from their shared home, the other feels bereft and deeply longs for the companionship of the other. John thinks ahead to what can happen after his assignment is completed and he plays over and over in his head the Norn word “for something that has disappeared or been lost; something never to be found in spite of searching.”
The joy of reading this novel comes in the immersion we feel inside that damp little house on that remote island—the fire crackling while Ivar knits socks and a hat for John, cooks him meals of fish and potatoes and porridge. It is a house with mounds of lady’s mantle that grows abundantly just outside it, with ocean breezes, the guttural grunts of the cormorants. John listens to Ivar’s loving susurration—with his old horse Pegi.
Later in the novel, Mary ponders three—and then four—stages of her life. At one point in what she says is the second stage of her life, when her father dies and she is alone in the world, “she’d been busy with her walks and her books and been more or less alone but in no way unhappy.”
And this seems to be true of Ivar and John, too. That is, each seems to have come to terms with a contentedness with solitude—an acceptance of it as a means to simply survive in the world.
As readers will find, Mary far prefers the quiet of that former life. She meets John after an explosion—and Ivar after yet another.
Unexpected things occur in this marvelous novel—things that are far outside even all that was occurring during this contentious period and these places.
The novel shows us that people in this part of the world at that time endured lives that were upended in sudden and explosive ways—and had to keep going, even when it seemed like all they’d ever known and believed dissipated like so much smoke. And once it cleared, they could see they’d survived and were still essentially who they’d always been.
