On a remote North Sea island somewhere off the coast of Scotland, a lone tenant is to be removed by his landlord and replaced by more profitable sheep.
Impoverished Scottish minister John Ferguson has been engaged to undertake the delicate eviction, travelling 400 miles to be set down on the island’s rocky shores. But he’s out of his depth and very soon in physical danger – until Ivar, the man he has been sent to remove – comes to his rescue.
Clear is a gem of a novel by prizewinning Welsh writer Carys Davies, a perfectly pitched tale of human connection set at the intersection of two of Scotland’s greatest historic social upheavals. The book’s title is a nod to one of them: the infamous Clearances that began in the mid-18th century when Scotland’s rural poor were systematically removed by landowners to make way for other agricultural pursuits.
For Ferguson, picking his way over the island’s rocks “like a tall, slightly undernourished wading bird”, the eviction assignment is as disagreeable as it sounds. The young clergyman is one of 450 rebel ministers who have spurned landowner control in the Scottish Church’s Great Disruption of 1843. Now without church, manse or stipend, and recently married to his adored Mary, Ferguson simply needs the commission’s £14 fee.
“You see, Mary, it is all right,” he reassures himself as he wrings seawater from his neck cloth and watches the steamer that has delivered him to Ivar’s island pull away. “You have no need to worry. I will do what I have come to do and before you know it, I will be home.”
Within a day of his damp arrival, however, Ferguson has a near-fatal fall from one of the island’s treacherous cliff paths. Ivar finds the unconscious stranger on the beach below, “his body pale and shining in the cool sunlight … arms outstretched and face to the sky”, and takes him in. Over the weeks of recuperation that follow, and despite the lack of a shared language, the men form a bond that takes them both by surprise.
It’s a masterfully understated scenario that belies the novel’s mere 140 pages. Davies neatly reveals the dilemmas facing each of her protagonists in prose that’s lucid and faultlessly paced. How will Ferguson tell Ivar the truth about his business on the island? Will Ivar confess he’s hiding the calotype image of Mary that he found in the minister’s scattered belongings? And what about Mary, who’s so anxious for her husband’s welfare she has pawned her wedding ring to come to his rescue? What will she find on her arrival?
In the meantime, the austere beauty of Ivar’s island weaves its magic on its fictional inhabitants and the reader. Ivar teaches Ferguson his Nordic-style dialect, rich with words for the island’s different birds, fish and vegetation: “For knitting and spinning and carding the wool; for eating quietly and eating noisily … for crouching by the fire and shooing away the hens.”
The island’s wild weather is captured in equally resonant vocabulary – “a fog could be a skump or a gyolm, a blura, an ask or a dunk … the wind could be a binder or a gas, an asel or a geul, and a string of other things John Ferguson couldn’t remember” – but the period of calm after a storm, Ivar explains, is simply leura.
Of course, and as the novel reminds us, it’s in the nature of any lull to be short and unreliable. The pair’s island idyll may be unsustainable, and the times they live in inhumane, but Clear – like leura – is something to savour.
