CLEAR: A Novel, the most loving novel I've read in 2024

CLEAR: A Novel
CARYS DAVIES
Scribner
$24.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A stunning, exquisite novel from an award-winning writer about a minister dispatched to a remote island off of Scotland to “clear” the last remaining inhabitant, who has no intention of leaving—an unforgettable tale of resilience, change, and hope.

John, an impoverished Scottish minister, has accepted a job evicting the lone remaining occupant of an island north of Scotland—Ivar, who has been living alone for decades, with only the animals and the sea for company. Though his wife, Mary, has serious misgivings about the errand, he decides to go anyway, setting in motion a chain of events that neither he nor Mary could have predicted.

Shortly after John reaches the island, he falls down a cliff and is found, unconscious and badly injured, by Ivar who takes him home and tends to his wounds. The two men do not speak a common language, but as John builds a dictionary of Ivar’s world, they learn to communicate and, as Ivar sees himself for the first time in decades reflected through the eyes of another person, they build a fragile, unusual connection.

Unfolding in the 1840s in the final stages of the infamous Scottish Clearances—which saw whole communities of the rural poor driven off the land in a relentless program of forced evictions—this singular, beautiful, deeply surprising novel explores the differences and connections between us, the way history shapes our deepest convictions, and how the human spirit can survive despite all odds. Moving and unpredictable, sensitive and spellbinding, Clear is a profound and pleasurable read.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What a simple, joyful story. A pair of souls are separated and so each is dissatisfied with Life. Neither knows the other exists. As the wheels of Fate catch and shudder away in the eternal darkness of chimrie (Heaven in Norn), bringing Ivar the endling of his people, and John the prodigal son of the Presbyterian faith, into their close communion, the story moves its calm inexorable way forward. Every time Ivar speaks in his dying tongue (Norn went extinct around 1850 in reality), John strains to learn what his words mean, what they describe and therefore come to form in John's mind.

The fact that John, clergyman, does this work is very telling. That he does it with the man he's been sent to dispossess of his lifelong home is...crucial. That he does this work with this man after taking this job to support Mary, his newly-wed wife, left behind on mainland Scotland; that he has sided with the anti-capitalists in the Disruption of 1843 and reluctantly took this job anyway; all these details add up to an ending that I found deeply moving, satisfying, and intensely soothing. I'm not going to spoil it for you because Author Carys makes it into quite the reveal.

I do not for a second believe it could have ended this way. I am sure it could have happened this way, though. But...well...1843, Presbyterians, human jealousy...it was a huge stretch for me to get over even one of those hurdles to accept that situation as presented as the ending of the story.

I will not downgrade this beautifully written fairy tale for lacking verisimilitude. I will go with the logic that Author Carys employs, and recommend the same course to you in your own read of the story.

Which, it being a short, fast read with the kind of language use that makes me wish this is what y'all called poetry, should be done soonest.