A tender treasure
Clear
Carys Davies Scribner
Carys Davies still feels undersung, at least on American shores. The Welsh author of two prior novels and two story collections has produced a jewel of a new novel, Clear.
It takes place in 1843, within two important historical moments that Davies outlines in an author's note: first, the “Great Disruption,” when 474 Scottish ministers broke away from the “system of patronage” that meant landowners could install hand-picked ministers in the parishes on their estates. These rebel ministers, to protect their autonomy as interpreters of doctrine as well as to establish churches where and as they chose, formed a “new Free Church,” giving up their homes and incomes “to start again from scratch.”
A mandate called the Clearances had commenced, during which “whole communities of the rural poor were forcibly removed from their homes” so that landowners could make room for sheep, which required less maintenance and returned a better profit.
As Clear opens, a sombre, brave, flat-broke Free Church minister named John Ferguson is deposited, after a seasick-making voyage, at a remote northern Scottish island to evict — for a promised payment of 16 pounds — the island's sole inhabitant, a shy, galumphing tenant farmer named Ivar.
It's hard to overstate how deftly and viscerally Davies's prose conveys this world. Every scene is imbued with austere beauty. Ferguson goes “picking his way over the rocks like a tall, slightly undernourished wading bird, thin black hair blowing vertically in the persisting wind, silently talking to his absent wife.”
That would be Mary. She instinctively distrusts John's mission, though she fully grasps their desperate financial need. Despite his reassurances, Mary is disturbed remembering news she has read about evictees “who had wanted very much to stay where they were and farm, instead of seeing their houses burned or reduced to rubble and the land they'd worked for generations laid under sheep.”
On his first day on the island, John falls off a seaside cliff. Ivar discovers him washed ashore, still breathing. Davies attends to Ivar's thinking (rendered in English) with tender, meticulous care. A kind of gentle Quasimodo, he is huge, smelly, deeply thoughtful, reticent. He speaks only a version of an ancient (real) dialect called Norn. One of the novel's lovely triumphs is its focus on the two men's struggle to communicate, as John — whom Ivar slowly nurses back to strength — becomes Ivar's student, writing down all he learns.
Each man's awareness blooms. Ivar is filled “with hope and happiness” when John greets him at home each day.
John's secret dilemma intensifies: How to break to Ivar the news of his official mission? A timeline enforces their faceoff, as the boat removing Ivar is due soon. Then shrewdly, yet naturally, Davies allows Ivar his own pre-emptive discoveries, while Mary, unbearably anxious about John's absence, sets sail for the island to put things right.
What quietly happens feels astonishing.