Novel Readings

Into her mind a picture came of this vast emptying-out—a long, gray, and never-ending procession of tiny figures snaking their way through the country. She saw them moving away with quiet resignation, leading animals and small children, carrying tools and furniture and differently sized bundles, and when at last they disappeared she saw the low houses they’d left behind, roofless hearths open to the rain and the wind and the ghosts of the departed while sheep nosed between the stonework, quietly grazing.

I really liked Clear. It’s a slight book in a way, not very long, not very dense. The small personal story it tells, though, is like the visible tip of an iceberg, three people whose options and choices are very much functions of much larger social contexts. Davies’s author’s note explains that the novel takes place in 1843, during the “Great Disruption” that led to the formation of the Free Church of Scotland and also during the ongoing “Clearances,” during which landlords removed tenant farmers, driving them off the land to clear it for more profitable uses—profitable, that is, to the landlords, but with devastating consequences for those displaced from their homes and their ways of life.

The plot of Clear is very simple: John Ferguson, part of the new Free Church, is having trouble making ends meet so his brother-in-law pulls some strings and John is assigned to do a bit of work for a local landowner, traveling to a remote island to “clear” it of its one remaining inhabitant, a man named Ivar. We move between John’s point of view and Ivar’s, getting to know John and learning about Ivar’s solitary but full life. We see the two men’s stories converge: John falls off a cliff soon after landing, and Ivar discovers him and nurses him back to health. Ivar does not suspect the real reason for John’s visit; John does not have the words to tell him even if he wanted to, which he doesn’t.

Davies gives a lot of attention to the importance of language, first as a barrier and then, as John laboriously gains some ability to speak Ivar’s language (a version, Davies’s note explains, of “Norn,” which died out in most areas after the Shetlands passed from Danish to Scottish control), a means of halting but profound understanding. “Before the arrival of John Ferguson,” Ivar reflects,

he’d never really thought of the things he saw or heard or touched or felt as words . . . He wondered . . . if there was a word in John Ferguson’s language for the excitement he felt when he ran his finger down the line between the two columns of words, which seemed to him to connect their lives in the strongest possible way—words for ‘milk’ and ‘stream’ and the flightless blue-winged beetle that lived in the hill pasture; words for ‘halibut’ and ‘byre’ and the overhand knot he used in the cow’s tether; words for ‘house’ and ‘butter,’ for ‘heather’ and ‘whey,’ for ‘sea wrack’ and ‘chicken.’

It was as if he’d never fully understood his solitude until now—as if, with the arrival of John Ferguson, he had been turned into something he’d never been or hadn’t been for a long time: part brother and part sister, part son and part daughter, part mother and part father, part husband and part wife.

Those last words have a bit more significance than they might initially seem to when they land just as part of that long list of vocabulary. By the end of Clear John and Ivar, and then John and Ivar and John’s wife Mary (who has bravely come to find him, worried that he has been sent unknowingly into a more dangerous situation than he suspected) have to rethink their relationships, their commitments—but I will leave the details to be discovered.

There was a moment in the novel when I thought Davies had given in to melodrama—a gunshot rings out, and I thought . . . well, I won’t say what I thought, again so that you can discover the moment for yourself if you want to. If things had gone the way it seemed at first, it would have cheapened the novel, which I think finds its beauty in its simplicity, which is not to say it ignores complexity, just that it takes us through its chosen scenario with a kind of quiet well suited to its people and its setting. Overall Clear reminded me of Emma Donoghue’s Haven, which is also about remoteness, isolation, essentials. Haven is a plottier novel, but both books trade in the imaginative appeal of clearing away the noise and demands and expectations of an uncongenial modernity. At the same time, neither novel romanticizes its setting. In both, it’s togetherness that leads to grace, if any such as possible.