Carys Davies

This is historical fiction about a thing I'd never heard of. In the mid-1800s Scottish landowners decided to evict all the humans from their sparsely populated lands and colonize them only with sheep who were expected to take care of themselves. Some of these people had lived there for generations and, of course, had nowhere else to live. One of these island dwellers had lost his whole family. Ivar lived in extreme poverty with only his old animals, a horse named Daisy whom he loved and communicated with as a friend, and an old blind cow which was the main source of his nourishment - boiled milk with a little grain. He asked so little of life and was about to get less. John, who had left the established Presbyterian church to become a preacher in the free church of Scotland was hired to go to the island and take a month to convince or force Ivan to leave. His animals were even more disposable than he. The book covers the growing relationship between these two men who couldn't even speak each other's language. John's loving wife Mary had her own troubles trying to survive with critical relatives as she waited for her husband. This little book is so full of humanity that it engulfed my heart. I don't want to say any more about it except that I'm certainly going to read more by Davies.… (more)

The historical backdrop of Carys Davies’ quietly powerful novel, Clear, is the Highland Clearances. By 1843 Scottish landowners had been evicting tenant farmers—some of whom had been working the same patch of land for generations—for close to a century and replacing the farmers and their families with sheep and cattle, which needed little tending and generated greater profit. Also in 1843, the Scottish Church was in crisis, with a third of the ministers leaving the established church to form the Free Church of Scotland. However, by quitting their parishes, many of these ministers found themselves staring poverty in the face with no immediate prospects for earning a living. This is why, in Davies’ novel, penniless and recently married minister John Ferguson accepts a mission from a landowner named Lowrie to travel to an island somewhere in the North Sea between Shetland and Norway to evict Ivar, the last remaining tenant farmer. With reluctance but aware of his limited options, Ferguson makes the journey—leaving wife Mary with relatives in Penicuik—and arrives on the island, for what he has been told will be a month-long stay, with some extra clothes, a satchel of papers (including the eviction order), a gun that he doesn’t know how to use, and virtually no schooling in the obscure variation of the Scots language that Ivar speaks. Ivar has lived on the island for all of his forty-odd years, choosing to remain following the departure of the other tenants and his own family. His quiet, solitary life consists of fishing, subsistence farming, knitting the wool produced by a few scrawny sheep, and caring for a blind cow and stubborn horse. But before the two men even meet, Ferguson suffers a mishap while bathing, slipping on the rocks, striking his head and tumbling into the water. Not having been informed of Lowrie’s intentions, Ivar has no idea who the naked man is when he comes across Ferguson unconscious on the beach, takes him back to his hovel, and tends to his injuries. When Ferguson regains consciousness a few days later, he quickly realizes that the man taking care of him is the man he was sent to evict, but, daunted by Ivar’s size and obvious physical strength, says nothing. Davies’ novel charts the emergence of an unlikely friendship, as Ivar teaches Ferguson his language word by word and the two men attain a state of mutual dependence and affectionate camaraderie neither was expecting. Davies’ use of evocative and often stunningly apt historical detail, together with the archaic speech patterns of the characters, transport us back to a strange world distant in both time and space. For all its brevity, Clear reads like a longer work, one that enfolds the reader in its embrace and doesn’t let go until the somewhat fanciful and surprising, but dramatically satisfying ending. It also speaks volumes to our fractured modern world about how humans can find ways to connect despite their differences.… (more)