Reading Carys Davies’s new novel brought to mind her short story The Quiet, first published in the Stinging Fly in 2012, and subsequently as the opening story of her award-winning collection The Redemption of Galen Pike. The Quiet considers the lives of three people in a historical, isolated location – a married couple and their sole neighbour, Henry Fowler, whose strange, seemingly malevolent presence gives great tension to events; it’s the kind of story where you don’t realise you’ve been holding your breath until the end.
Davies has an innate sense of how drama and tension interact with each other, which is to say her stories tend to eschew the dramatic in favour of the small moments that can change the course of lives. Her novels to date have been compact, taut, elegant – reminiscent of the style of Claire Keegan – short on word-count, big on emotional impact. Her debut West (2018), a quietly moving morality tale set in frontier America, won the Wales Book of the Year Fiction award, was runner-up for the Society of Author’s McKitterick Prize and was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize.
For her third novel Davies has chosen another unusual backdrop, a fictional Scottish island beyond the Shetlands in 1843. An afterword outlines the historical significance: 1843 was the year of the Great Disruption in the Scottish Church, when hundreds of ministers disillusioned by a system of patronage that gave too much power to landowners broke away to form the Free Church. Scotland was also at that time in the midst of the Clearances, where communities of poor rural renters, or crofters, were evicted from their homes to make way for crops, cattle and sheep.
In Clear the two backdrops align when John Ferguson, a newly-wed, impoverished church minister from Edinburgh, takes up a well-paid commission to evict the last remaining inhabitant of a northerly island on behalf of a landowner. The difficulty of the job lies not just in reaching the remote island but in making clear the message to the tenant, Ivar, who doesn’t speak English. (In her acknowledgements Davies credits Jakob Jakobsen’s Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland as inspiration.)
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Her love of language comes through in the clarity of her writing and more overtly through the storyline of Ivar and John’s considerable efforts to communicate with each other
Armed with a satchel of supplies, eviction deeds, some loosely translated phrases and a gun, Ferguson’s arrival on island, soaked and seasick after a rough passage on a fishing trawler, makes for a classically dramatic opening, which Davies immediately undercuts by shifting to Ivar’s reflective viewpoint, showing us about his world, lowering the pulse: “Ivar worked hard all morning, laying new turf and straw in the places where the bad weather had torn up the roof, tying it all down with his gnarly weighted ropes. It gave him a good calm feeling to do the work – climbing up on to the roof and down again, trudging back and forth over the boggy soil and every so often pausing to sharpen his knife.”
To say more about the plot, even at this early stage, would risk the immense reading pleasure to be found within the carefully constructed story where the actions and choices of three spirited characters – Ivar; John; and John’s wife, Mary – set in motion a chain of events that will have profound consequences. Davies uses an omniscient narrator to move between the perspectives, expertly splicing their stories together. “You never knew in advance if a decision was the right one,” Mary notes later in the novel. “All you could do was try to imagine the future and use that to help you make up your mind in a difficult situation, and if you couldn’t imagine the future, well, you had to make up your mind anyway.”
It is no spoiler to say that Davies’ characteristically nimble evocation of place is in evidence throughout: a sea that is “restless and unruly and wild, spindrift from the heavy breakers striking against the shore and forming a deep mist along the coast”; “the runnel of dirty water in the clay floor beside his bed” in Ivar’s bothy; the flora and fauna of the island, “kittiwakes and razorbills and the different kinds of seaweed that grew along the foreshore – the yellow one called crawtang and the greenish-black one called bongtang”.
Her love of language comes through in the clarity of her writing and more overtly through the storyline of Ivar and John’s considerable efforts to communicate with each other. The inclusion of Norn words lends further authenticity to the fiction and never feels tokenistic. Clear is the story of remarkable people seeking to do their best to understand the intricacies of each other’s worlds. Amid the barbarity of mass evictions, with all their modern resonances, Davies ultimately offers us a story that is hopeful and humane.
