THE MISSION HOUSE, Carys Davies tells the tale of a post-colonial colonizer's Finding Himself ::eye roll::

THE MISSION HOUSE
CARYS DAVIES
Scribner
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In The Mission House, Hilary Byrd flees his demons and the dark undercurrents of contemporary life in England for a former British hill station in south India. Charmed by the foreignness of his new surroundings and by the familiarity of everything the British have left behind, he finds solace in life’s simple pleasures, travelling by rickshaw around the small town with his driver Jamshed and staying in a mission house beside the local presbytery where, after a chance meeting, the Padre and his adoptive daughter Priscilla take Hilary under their wing.

The Padre is concerned for Priscilla’s future, and as Hilary’s friendship with the young woman grows, he begins to wonder whether his purpose lies in this new relationship. But religious tensions are brewing and the mission house may not be the safe haven it seems

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My Review: Hilary Byrd is coming unglued. He's in the early stages of a mental breakdown, he's fast departing the middle-aged years with their gradual loss of the pleasant illusion of a limitless future, and he's at odds with modern England at every turn. His rock of a sister can't seem to save him from this sense of being cut off, so for once in his life he takes a decision. He decides, about his own life's direction, that he will go Find Himself in India.

She disapproves of this, really for quite sensible reasons, but the time to be sensible is past.

I was ready, at that point, to stop reading for good. After all, I liked—a lot—but didn't love Author Carys's novella West, with its gorgeous sentences and its superbly concentrated plotting. I thought this read would be a similar exercise. So I put it down at this rather mundane point, and didn't pick it up until I read this year's glorious paean to Love, and lovingkindness, Clear.

This turbocharged my willingness to look further into this take on self-discovery through travel to "exotic" locale...a drearily bourgeois genre that I really, really do not like. Elizabeth Gilbert and Peter Mayles ruined it for me with their icky Othering search for "Authenticity" which comes across to me in this elder stage of my life as "authentoxicity." I am shocked at anyone, in the twenty-first century, who can make it all the way through a story like those without thinking, "interrogate your privilege, or at the very least recognize it!" That is, of course, the person of the Twenties talking to people of the Nineties...societal advances do not travel against time's arrow.

But this story isn't of its time...its time is now...nor is it about another time, it's set now. Just not here. Ooty, the old British "hill station" where the book is set, is in South India. Are your feelies itching as much as mine right now? I mean...hill station! That really übercolonial concept of "place the colonizers go to escape the commonfolk when it gets too hot." And a British guy rents a mission house, where the imperialists of the spirit retired from their efforts to screw up the indigenous population's relationship to their own souls with the caustic bleach of christiainty!

The icks are building steadily.

This, then, was not the most satifying of follow-up reads to my joyously absorbed Clear. I'm not revealing my dark corners when I say that all things christian leave me coldly hostile. Hilary isn't much of a christian, demonstrating a glancing awareness of but no familiarity with the mythos. His occupancy of a younger colonialist man's living quarters that were built as, and still serve as, a locus for slopping this terrible blighting thought pollution all over poor India (which, not coincidentally, has its own history of exporting religious intolerance). That young man's rush home to Canada is, permaybehaps, intended to serve as a kind of Divine Will's invitation for void-of-course Hilary to come be a white savior. I got that vibe as his relationship with Priscilla deepened, mostly because of "the Padre," who I took against from giddy-up to whoa.

Nonetheless, I can say that my tonal twangs where I was likely meant to thrum instead, were idiosyncratic to me. I think a person less repulsed by christian overtones might not even see them in this story. My discomfort with the ableist misogyny, the colonialist-Finding-Himself in the former colony, and that really terrible Padre, means all my stars are for the beautiful sentences, unfolded with the inevitability of flower petals obeying Bernoulli's spiral.

Not my most resounding recommendation, I fear.

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

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

Longlisted for the 2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction!

WINNER of the £10,000 2025 Ondaatje Prize for writing that “best evokes the spirit of a place.”

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.

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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.

WEST, a concentrated, almost freeze-dried, tale of the American West and its casualties

WEST
CARYS DAVIES
Scribner
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: When widowed mule breeder Cy Bellman reads in the newspaper that colossal ancient bones have been discovered in the salty Kentucky mud, he sets out from his small Pennsylvania farm to see for himself if the rumors are true: that the giant monsters are still alive and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River. Promising to write and to return in two years, he leaves behind his only daughter, Bess, to the tender mercies of his taciturn sister and heads west.

With only a barnyard full of miserable animals and her dead mother’s gold ring to call her own, Bess, unprotected and approaching womanhood, fills lonely days tracing her father’s route on maps at the subscription library and waiting for his letters to arrive. Bellman, meanwhile, wanders farther and farther from home, across harsh and alien landscapes, in reckless pursuit of the unknown.

My Review: A lovely little book, a slip of a thing that has the gravitas of a far longer book in a far more concentrated and sharp novella.

I can't blame anyone for finding the story sad, it surely is; but with an ending so deeply felt and so beautifully wrought that the most size-conscious reader can't come away feeling gypped. Old Woman from a Distance, the teenaged Shawnee veteran of the Trail of Tears, is a beautifully rendered portrait of The Survivor; Bellman, the red-bearded widowed dreamer, is the portrait of The Fool. Deveraux the French fur trader and Aunt Julie Bellman are sides of the coin that shifty neighbor Elmer and faithless frontiersman Hollinghurst steal with simple, transparent tricks. I knew I'd loathe Aunt Julie on p23:

After a month {Bess} asked her Aunt Julie if they could go to the library so she could look at the big journals of the President's Expedition and see the path her father had taken into the west, but Aunt Julie only looked at her in a kind of irritated amazement.
"And when, child," Bellman's sister demanded to know, "do you suppose I have time to sit in a library?"

Yeah, no. We ain't a-gonna be book-besties, me'n'Julie, no way no how. Nor does Bess, Bellman's amazing daughter, find much to love in her father's sister:

Aunt Julie said what a pretty girl Dorothy had turned into and she wouldn't be surprised if Sidney {a rich-but-loutish boy Bess told off some time ago} and Dorothy weren't a married pair a few years from now. What did Bess think of that?
Bess said she thought nothing of it. Bess said that was the last thing in the world she'd think of thinking about.

Aunt Julie in a nutshell; Bess to the teeth an anti-Julie like anti-matter is to baryonic matter. A horrible life to live, one with someone who simply isn't capable of connecting with you. But worse is to come, as we know.

When events unspool in the second half of the book and several separate tragedies unfold, it's Author Davies's skill at telling the story that keeps pages turning. You see, this is a tale told, not a life lived in prose. This book is the well-written story of the story. It's a distancing narrative strategy. I don't mind it too awful terrible much when the sentences are lovely and the paragraphs lead me to the finish line without becoming arch, or unfocused. Archness is perhaps the bigger danger, since Author Davies is an experienced hand at writing short stories (eg, Some New Ambush, The Redemption of Galen Pike). In fact, this feels like a novella that sprang from a short story which simply couldn't contain the entire necessary plot.

So I'm a fraction off ecstatic, but on the high end of very well pleased, at the end of the read. I recommend it to anyone who needs a dose of a truly spunky and resourceful character (Bellman) and a stern, steely hero (Bess) who meet their fates without a single illusion between them and reality. The illusions have all burned away. This explains their differing ends.