Clear by Carys Davies

Granta (2024) £12.99 hb

A Review by John McLellan

Clear attracted me as someone who has spent time wandering around the remains of clearance villages in the far north, discovering some of the reality and getting a glimmer of the grimness and horror of what the Clearances meant to human beings.  I also came to Clear as someone who really enjoyed Carys Davies’ first novel, West. This new novel did not disappoint. 

This is a story about both isolation and connection.  A lot of the time, the reader is immersed in the life of one man living in a remote and desolate place somewhere off the coast of northern Scotland.  His world is about the day-to-day fight against the elements, keeping his home and his livestock, and himself, alive and in good order.

Unbeknown to him, other characters, richer and more powerful, have designs on his land.  They want him off it – evicted.  The basic story of the Highland Clearances maybe, through the lens of a singular life.  A religious man is sent to do the deed, someone who is struggling to make ends meet in a life he shares with his wife and with the Church.  He feels he is doing something against the grain but the need for the monetary reward trumps his conscience.

The two men encounter each other in a chaotic manner and after a near-death experience.  The person who initially has power loses it and becomes dependent on the person who he has come to dispossess. The one who has spent years on his own finds it easier to manage than the one who has arrived from the seemingly more civilised world of the mainland.

Time passes and the religious man’s wife fears for her husband and we learn something of the insecurity she has felt in her marriage, and this has not been just to do with the lack of money. Her journey is tricky and it’s not obvious if she will manage it and what she will find when she arrives. She becomes dependent on the goodwill of others and I found myself fearful for her in a world of mostly rough and dour men.

What emerges is that both the religious man and his wife have been compelled to have trust in others, in unfamiliar and potentially scary situations.  To this point the story feels to me that it is about those eternal concerns of power, trust and dependency.  But ultimately something else emerges.  Something very surprising, but a thing that made me realise this story could have been written about today.  Yes, the setting, the world of the characters, is all in the past but the very human connectedness, central to the story, is as relevant today as at any other time.

The book left me thinking – a lot!  I kept going back to passages for another look, ending up going through it all again.  It is the subtle and thoughtful writing of the author that draws the reader so easily into another time and another place.  It’s also what makes this such a unique and enjoyable story.