The idea of a historical fiction novel that sends you repeatedly running to Wikipedia usually sounds like a hefty tome, some kind
of sweeping epic like Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. But Carys Davies’s Clear is a tiny little jewel box of a novel, not even 200 pages long (or just a hair over three hours for the audiobook I listened to). But Davies takes you into the Scottish clearances, the 1843 schism in the Scottish Presbyterian church, Scots dialect, the dying Norse-derived languages of the northernmost Scottish islands, the Comrie earthquake swarm, etc, in this compact little span. The novel follows three characters: John Ferguson, a minister who has sided with the newly formed Free Church in the recent schism and is now, accordingly, broke, which has led him into work evicting tenants, particularly Ivar, the last remaining person on a tiny Shetland island, who speaks only Norn; waiting for John back in Scotland is his wife, Mary, a determined, intelligent, and, beneath all her resolve, tender-hearted woman who does not like the work John has taken up, and takes matters into her own hands.
When John arrives on the island to serve the eviction to Ivar, he takes a fall, injuring himself badly: Ivar, oblivious to what’s going on, finds him and out both his loneliness and his fundamental decency nurses John back to health. As John slowly recovers, he begins learning Ivar’s language and building a tenuous friendship with him. Mary spends the first half of the novel fretting, and then goes to find John herself and bring him back, believing no money is worth the cruelty of booting crofters out of their homes.
“It fell on the trodden clay floor and the edge of the low table and the pot in Ivar’s lap and on Ivar’s sleeping face, illuminating it and separating it from the surrounding gloom the way some paintings do—a lined and weatherworn face, heavy, with a kind of hewn quality; not an old face, but not a young one either.”
All these characters are fundamentally good people, caught in a historical moment that is not itself particularly tender or kind, and how they will manage to retain their decency while surviving is the fundamental question. But Davies shows us what has equipped them: John, for instance, is a theologically strict man in many ways, but when Mary is distressed at a passive-aggressive accusation of vanity over her false teeth from an acquaintance, he reassures her immediately and gently; Mary is inquisitive, independent, and the empathetic counter-balance to John’s religious rigor, never losing sight of the human; Ivar is so unfailingly kind to even his blind cow, describing the natural world around him to her as he tends to her, and so attentive to the natural world. John’s intellect is both the barrier between him and Ivar and the bridge: he is so deeply and profoundly different, but learning Ivar’s language brings him a joy that his current line of work could not have offered, and which supersedes his previous task of translating the gospels into Scots.
“He still couldn’t differentiate, for example, between the great number of words that to him seemed to denote ‘a rough sea.’ Nor could he separate a gob from a gagl, a degi from a dyapl, a dwog from a diun.”
Neither the Fergusons nor Ivar can undo or overturn the historical forces they are caught within: that’s not the drama that Davies invokes here. Instead, how can we retain our humanity even as history moves around us, in ways that are often brutal, sometimes straightforward and other times subtle in their cruelty? Love and language are the means of transformation here, and while they are limited, they are far from meaningless.