Two major events were happening in Scotland in 1843: one religious, and one agricultural. On the religious front, a bitter schism erupted in the Church of Scotland, where evangelicals fiercely opposed control of the church by landowners split off to form the Free Church. At the same time, the Scottish Clearances started: landowners started replacing their subsistence-farming tenants with sheep, thus requiring the removal of the tenants by forced eviction or emigration.
Carys Davies sets her novel Clear in this framework, with two main characters whose lives are upended by the two events. John Ferguson is a minister of the new Scottish Free Church which has no buildings or funds. In his fifties, recently married and devoted to his 40-something wife Mary, he is desperate for a job, and accepts the task of travelling to a remote island to evict its only inhabitant.
That inhabitant is Ivar, born and brought up on the island. His brothers all died in a fishing wreck, his father died on the island, and his female relatives all decided to emigrate. He lives alone, scratching out a living for himself, the horse Pegi, a blind cow, and the sheep. These subsistence tenants were also obliged to pay rent to the landowner for the privilege of their spartan existence, and their bitter poverty becomes clear from the rent:
Strachan [the landowner’s ‘factor’ or manager] had come back twice, first the following summer and then the one after, asking for rent — for feathers and woollen goods and the cuffs and collars the women embroidered [..] or anything at all that they could pay with — but with Ivar’s brothers drowned and his father gone, they’d had a miserable time of it. […] they hadn’t enough hands to work the land.
Those ‘woollen goods’ required shearing the sheep, carding and spinning the wool, then knitting it into sweaters and hats and socks. The feathers were gathered by hand. At one point seaweed was part of the rent.
[He] had shown them how to dig the pits and line them with stones and fill them with wrack and cook it and stir it with the long iron spikes he’d brought, and how to leave it to cool and then break it up into the oily blue lumps he would come back to collect. [..] Cooking the wrack was filthy, arduous work, and while they did it they had none to spread on the ground for their barley and potatoes, and both failed.
A penurious existence, but Ivar is surviving, somehow, when John Ferguson lands on the island. Completely unprepared for the terrain and weather, John slips and is found senseless on the ground by Ivar, who tends him in his tiny hut, finds and repairs John’s clothing, shares his porridge and fish, without knowing that John is here to turf Ivar off the island by decree, argument or even force.
The growing relationship between the two men is at the heart of this book. They do not even speak the same language: Ivar’s dialect (unnamed in the book but can be identified as Norn via some Googling) is spoken by almost no one in Scotland. Language is a continuous thread in this short novel: over the course of the book, John starts picking up words and writing them down.
Woven through [Ivar’s short sentences] were a few words John Ferguson thought he recognized — a handful that sounded like fish, peat, sheep, day, look, me, I, but delivered in an accent that made it impossible to be sure. Anything familiar was hard to pick out because of the way it was woven so tightly with so much he didn’t know and couldn’t guess.[…] After a few days, though, they started to be able to speak to each other in a simple, noun-filled way. Ivar’s knitting needles were his wires. The box in which he kept his bait was his kilpek. The fish liver puddings he made were krus; the porridge was lik.
The novel is written in the voices of Ivar and John, as well as one other — Mary, John’s wife. Mary has a smaller part in this novel, but her voice is still quite distinct, touched by her own backstory and her abiding love for John. The history and events of the time are very naturally woven into their thoughts and actions.
Into her mind a picture came of this vast emptying-out [the Clearances] — a long, gray, and never-ending procession of tiny figures snaking their way like a river through the country. She saw them moving away with quiet resignation, leading animals and small children, carrying tools and furniture and differently sized bundles, and when at last they disappeared she saw the low houses they’d left behind, roofless hearths open to the rain and the wind and the ghosts of the departed while sheep nosed between the stonework, quietly grazing.
Davies writes in a spare, stark but yet polished style that reminded me of Claire Keegan. Her descriptions of the island are very vivid.
There wee days when the mist fell like a cloak onto the island’s shoulders; when rain fell in big, coarse drops, melting the soil into a soft brown soup; when a cold, light wind blew low over the ground, making the bogs shiver.
The ending is perhaps the only weak link in this book. It seems rushed, and the rapid convenient resolution was, I thought, unconvincing. That said, this memorable book is worth a read and beyond that, a re-read.
The title of this review is from a poem by Peter Hartley, author of The Remote Islands of Scotland
Clear
Carys Davies
Scribner, 2024
Recent Comments