James had soon become as enthusiastic as his father about taking the same big broom that others had been busy with all over Scotland, from Lanark in the south to Sutherland in the north, and it was galling to him now that they were so behindhand with their own removals when others — first in the Lowlands and then in the Highlands — had been making improvements, sweeping clean the countryside for decades and reaping the rewards. Like his father, he’d become impatient to make up for lost time — for there to be more and more portions of the Lowrie state that were rented out to a single flockmaster — where you could stand on a hill or rise and look out over clean, productive country that was quietly replete with sheep, instead of cluttered with the ramshackle dwellings of small, impoverished, unreliable tenants scraping a profitless living in a manner that no longer made any sense.
Author Carys Davies sets her historical fiction, Clear, at the intersection of two movements: the Clearances of the mid-Nineteenth Century (in which Scottish landowners removed small tenant farmers from their lands — many of whom had lived in the same place for countless generations — in order to put the pastures out for more profitable sheep grazing) and the Great Disruption in the Scottish Church (in which nearly a third of its ministers rebelled against the tradition of rich landowners installing ministers of their own choosing to local parishes, creating the Free Church of Scotland). Into this disruptive time, Davies imagines a solitary resident of a farflung northern island (“halfway to Norway”) — a blonde giant who is the last speaker of a unique Norn dialect — and the meek Free Church minister who takes on a paid contract to inform the islander of his impending eviction (a critical source of money for the man who hasn’t seen much income since the schism.) Davies writes beautifully of the wild landscape and its weather, she sympathetically crafts her characters with understandably opposing goals, and she absolutely captures the time and place with details large and small. On the other hand, this is a short novel and events play out as one would imagine, until suddenly they don’t, and then the whole thing ends in a way I didn’t really believe. For the detail writing — the landscape and characters — I was prepared to give four stars until the ending bits pulled me back to three. I’m glad I read this, but it’s not a favourite.
He stood for a long time in the softly falling rain and eventually he spoke to himself silently inside his own head: I have the cliffs and the skerries and the birds. I have the white hill and the round hill and the peaked hill. I have the clear spring water and the rich good pasture that covers the tilted top of the island like a blanket. I have the old black cow and the sweet grass that grows between the rocks, I have my great chair and my sturdy house. I have my spinning wheel and I have the teapot and I have Pegi, and now, amazingly, I have John Ferguson too.
I did love everything about the islander Ivar and the way that Davies richly painted his life through his unending routine of tasks and contemplation. When the minister, John Ferguson, first set foot on the island, he felt completely confident in the rightness of his task: after all, as a believer in providence, John knew that anything that happened on Earth — including the eviction of a poor recluse into the maw of civilisation — was nothing less than God’s will. But when John nearly immediately has a bad fall and awakes under Ivar's capable and generous care, John decides not to tell him immediately about his true purpose on the island. As the weeks go by and John learns a bit of Ivar’s language, helping him with his tasks and marvelling at his self-sufficiency, John becomes increasingly hesitant about his task — all while Ivar is reawakened to the beauty of companionship and hopes that John will never leave. Meanwhile, John’s capable wife, Mary, has heard stories of evictions gone wrong and she determines a rescue mission: there was good dramatic tension as these three characters’ storylines converge.
(I will parenthetically note that I did not like when John first woke up in Ivar’s hut, not quite remembering recent events, and muses that his doctor friend would tell him that temporary amnesia is nothing but a novelistic devise. That’s not meta or ironic: it’s annoying.)
There was a word in Ivar’s language for the moment before something happens; for the state of being on the brink of something. He’d tried several times to explain it using words John Ferguson already knew — with mimes and charades involving the water and the weather — but John Ferrguson had never been able to grasp what it was he was trying to tell him. In due course, John Ferguson will understand it. In due course, after a fair amount of back-and-forth and to-ing and fro-ing, he will arrive at a precise and succinct definition of it — a definition in which he will give, as examples of the sort of moment it describes, “the last moment before the tide turns; the last moment of day before night begins.”
It is undeniably a fact that true understanding between people can’t be achieved without a common language — that the death of a language is a tragedy because its specific vocabulary reveals the unique worldview and lived experience of a people — so I really did appreciate how Davies employed the Norn dialect in Clear, and how John’s increasing understanding of Ivar’s speech led to greater empathy for his position (though I don’t know if I believed they’d be having meaningful conversations after a few weeks.) For what I learned about the Clearances as it applied to the remote Orkney Islands, as well as the hardscrabble life eked out there at one time — as demonstrated by a thoroughly likeable character — I found this to be valuable. But Davies loses the plot along the way, and I can’t say that I enjoyed this over all.
