Clear

Finished August 8

Clear by Carys Davies

This historical novel is set in 1843, which is the year when about one-third of the ministers in Scotland rebelled against the patronage system whereby landowners would confer the position of minister in their parish or on their estates. This breakaway group was known as the new Free Church, and the ministers had to leave their homes (the manses the ministers lived in) and their church buildings and start from scratch. At first many held services in the open, with their parishioners asked to give what they could towards renting or building a new place for services and supplying an income for the ministers to live on. 

This was also towards the end of the period of Clearances, which had begun in the mid-eighteenth century. The Clearances consisted of landowners forcibly removing whole communities of the rural poor from their homes and livelihoods to make way for crops, cattle, and sheep, which would be managed centrally by the landowner. The landowner could then call on these desperate people for labour during the busier seasons and the people would be forced to make do with smaller, less fertile pieces of land, and piecemeal work. Some died, some went to larger industrialized cities, and many emigrated to North America or Australia. As the author notes in the afterward, when the potato blight began in 1846, these people still in Scotland began to starve. 

One of the three main characters here is John Ferguson, a minister that has chosen the Free Church, and is struggling to find money for a place for his parishioners to worship. He is middle-aged, well-read, curious, and recently married. Another character is Mary, his wife. She is also middle-aged, and had given up on ever marrying until chance brought the two of them together at a lecture. They are very much in love, and had spent money on two items that showed this. For Mary, it is a wedding ring that was important to her, and for John it is a calotype picture of Mary that he can take with him when he is away from her. John had made his decision to resign his living in Edinburgh a few months after their marriage.

The third central character is Ivar, a man living alone on a remote island near the edge of the Hebrides. Years before a storm had taken most of the young men on the island when they were fishing. There were two families, and one had left soon after. Ivar's mother, sister, and grandmother left a few years later for a new life, but he refused to leave, staying with his small horse, Pegi, his cow, his sheep, and his chickens. He made a living for himself, but barely survives, and spends his time when he isn't out on the land spinning yarn and knitting. 

Desperate for money, John accepts a favour from his brother-in-law and goes to work for a landowner. One of the tasks that has been given to him is to go to the island Ivar lives on and give him the notice of clearance. He is provided with documents, some scant help with the language Ivar speaks, food, and a pistol in case of trouble. A ship drops him off and will return for him in a few weeks. But John falls in an accident soon after landing on the island and it is Ivar who finds him, and some of his drenched possessions, and takes him in and cares for him. We see how the two form a relationship, a friendship, and how John learns his language gradually as he recovers his strength and decides how he can deliver the news he has been sent to deliver. 

After he has been gone a while, Mary worries about his safety after hearing stories of some of the more violent encounters during the Clearances, and sets out after him. 

The book description gives us these basic elements of the plot, but the way that Davies puts it all together is beautiful. There are many surprises, delights, and disappointments, but the characters here are so wonderfully drawn that I found it hard to leave the story. The book is short, but not fast-paced and the language is lovely. 

In the afterward Davies explains what she based Ivar's language on, and how she came to the idea for the book, which are related.