The year 1843 was momentous in the Scottish Church. After years of protest at the right of landowners to confer clerical livings on ministers of their choosing, a third of ministers broke away from the established church to form the Free Church of Scotland. Conscience came at a price. Stripped of their parishes, their manses and their incomes, many of the rebels found themselves penniless.
At the same time, Scottish landowners were engaged in the final throes of the Clearances, a century-long endeavour to expel tenants from land they had farmed for generations to make way for cattle, crops and sheep. This pitiless enterprise met little opposition from the church, established or free. Both preached the doctrine of providence, in which earthly events unfolded according to God’s will and suffering was His punishment for our sins. The faithful should bear their crosses and struggle on.
In Clear, her third novel, Carys Davies draws these two historical threads together to weave a tale of unlikely friendship. Desperate for money, rebel minister John Ferguson agrees to assist a landowner’s factor. He will voyage to the farthest part of the landowner’s estate, a nameless speck of an island halfway to Norway, to survey the land and evict Ivar, its last remaining inhabitant. The factor gives John an introduction to a schoolmaster with a few words of Ivar’s language (the man speaks no English or Scots), some basic supplies and a pistol, should Ivar become “excitable”. After a rough voyage on “an uppity sea”, a sodden John is finally deposited on the island. The boat will return in one month to collect him.
Wholly ill-suited to his mission, John manages a single night before, returning from bathing, he slips and falls from a cliff. He is discovered, unconscious and naked, by Ivar, “pale and shining in the cool sunlight” like “an enormous jellyfish”. Ivar carries John to his own bed. He feeds him and tends his wounds. He mends his tattered clothes, knitting pale-red sleeves for his black coat. Slowly, as John regains his strength, the two men form a bond.
Davies published The Mission House in 2020 but, at 160 pages, Clear elicits closer comparison with West, her startlingly good first novel. Like West, Clear grapples with the themes of longing and belonging, of loneliness and connection, but while West unfolds against the vast unexplored spaces of the American wilderness, Clear is rooted in a miniaturist landscape in which every rock is named and known. West’s tall-hatted protagonist, Cy Bellman, travels with his Shawnee guide for years and never thinks to learn the boy’s language. John Ferguson, on the other hand, is determined to master Ivar’s “peculiar tongue”. One by one, he meticulously writes down the words and their meanings, compiling a kind of dictionary of their life together. Words such as liki, the first twist of a ball of wool when it was “at the very start of what it would become”, and leura, the “short, unreliable quiet between storms”.
At its finest, Clear is a love letter to the scorching power of language, a power that Davies has long understood. She writes with amazing economy: in a few words she can summon worlds. The darkly funny West somehow carried all the weight of American hope and hubris between its narrow covers. Clear is written with the same spareness but, despite moments of affecting poignancy, too often it feels underwritten, even thin. Animated by his boyish wonder and the careful ritual of his daily tasks, the silent, big-hearted Ivar comes slowly, tenderly, into focus; but serious, anxious John remains out of reach. Davies grants us only rare glimpses into his conscience, which he determinedly pushes to one side, and fewer still into his heart, so that his growing preoccupation with Ivar’s language comes to feel less like an awakening than a smokescreen, for the reader as much as himself.
This difficulty is compounded by the time frame Davies has chosen. John Ferguson is granted a mere four weeks on Ivar’s island, four weeks into which must be compressed not only his recovery but the slow unfurling of a deep and transformational friendship. It is not enough. While West’s ending was undeniably fantastical, it had its own glorious logic for a book that was at least half fairytale. By contrast Clear’s final pages feel rushed, their rewards as yet unearned. Davies is a writer of immense talent and deep humanity, capable of balancing devastating audacity with equally devastating restraint. In Clear, she has allowed restraint too heavy a hand. A longer novel might have produced a deeper and more satisfying brew.
• Clear by Carys Davies is published by Granta (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
