Clear, by the Welsh writer, Carys Davies is magnificent. Published in 2024, it is a short novel that brings together two middle aged Scottish men of different backgrounds and purpose and shows how they find harmony despite their circumstances. John Ferguson is a married, Protestant minister, Ivar is the lone inhabitant on a small island that is part of a landowner’s estate. Ferguson visits the island when he is hired by the landowner to deliver a document that nullifies Ivar's rights as a tenant farmer, but he never delivers it because he falls off a rocky cliff. Ivar finds him unconscious on the sand below and takes him back to his cottage to recover. This strange and uneasy cohabitation is the novel’s subject, and page by page, the pleasure of Davies’ knowledge of a hostile landscape, a lost language, and a solitary rural lifestyle creates a deeply involving story about two men who seem dangerously stoic, the minister because he embraces hardship as God's will, Ivar because it is the condition of the life he has chosen.
Told in an omniscient third person, Clear is set in 1843, a time when two simultaneous political movements roiled the population and could believably result in the chance meeting of these two people. Ferguson is a renegade minister who is part of The Great Disruption, a movement formed when a third of the ministry broke off from the traditional church to create a sect that would be independent of powerful landowners who, by tradition, dictated how the church was run. Looking for an income to support himself and his wife Mary until he could establish his own congregation, Ferguson is hired, ironically enough, by one of those landowners to accomplish the unpleasant task of ousting the sole remaining tenant on an island that is part of his extensive territory. Called The Clearances, this second political movement created a massive uprooting of rural people as Scottish estate owners, having determined that grazing sheep would bring in far more income than rents from tenant farmers, removed an entire class of people from their homes. Ferguson goes to the island to deliver the clearance notice to its only inhabitant.
Solidly grounded in these historic events, the early pages of the novel introduced me to Ivar’s friendship with his horse, his physical agility on the rocky slopes and beaches of the island, and his resourceful strategies of survival. At the same time, I witnessed the many physical ineptitudes and cerebral preoccupations that make Ferguson an unfit candidate for the errand, something his wife, Mary, is painfully aware of. And, of course, it is only a short time before her fears are confirmed.
Political context often is the ambient chatter in a novel's background, but here the context pulls more weight, it provides the very reason the characters are thrown together. These realities are woven into the first chapter through metaphors that return, periodically, to remind the reader of what's at stake. The single word title, at first appearing to be neutral, helps to accomplish this task and so does the image of the broom introduced in the passage below when we are told that James, the son of the landowner who hired Ferguson, has taken up the fervor of the clearances.
"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 improvement, 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 ...estate 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" (27-8).
Mary, John's wife, not only understands, from the beginning, how unsuitable her husband is for the job, but also how senseless it is to get rid of a man who knows the island so intimately. When she argues her position, asking if he couldn't stay to do the shepherding, the "factor" replies in a patronizing tone:
"No, he could not, Mrs. Ferguson. As I said, there is no requirement for anyone, anymore, to be there all year round. Any inhabitant such as this one is quite redundant and, with his own needs and the needs of his motley collection of livestock, an encumbrance" (29-30).
Even without the mention of the key words, clear, broom and clean, the idea of making the land lucrative and tidy is obvious.
In this way, Davies grounds the novel in realities that not only create a believable situation but also echo contemporary issues of land use. Our news is filled with stories of industry clashing with environmentalists as well as the concept of redundancy, the catchphrase in our era when machines can replace workers. With this foundation, her central narrative, which is not the politics, but the unpredictable relationship between two solitary men blooms its timeless, deeply affecting, and beautifully unpredictable story.
Davies, Carys. Clear. New York: Scribner, 2024.
Filed under: Grounding a Novel in Historical Events