Thank you to NetGalley, the author and publishers for access to this ARC 📚.

🔥Quick Fire Review🔥

Genre/Themes: 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿✝️🌊🐟🌲🏳️‍🌈👩🏻‍❤️‍💋‍👨🏻👨🏻‍❤️‍💋‍👨🏼📜
Tropes: Betrayal, Fish Out of Water, Antihero, Forbidden Love, Strangers-to-Lovers, Priest, Changing Sexual Preference, Injury, Nursed Back to Health, Innocent Cohabitation, Stranded, Recluse, Home Invasion, Set in a Closed Community, Love Triangle
Positives ✅ : stunning atmosphere and enchanting prose, fascinating historical setting
Room for Improvement 🔎 : jarring pacing with a lot of anticlimaxes and an unsatisfying ending, uneven characterisation, lacklustre romance
Rating: 🌕🌕🌗

✍🏻Full Review - RISK OF SPOILERS 🛑

There was so much I could have loved about this book and in many ways it reminded me of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. But I can’t help but feel this book didn’t live up to its full potential, which left me feeling gutted and wanting MORE.

Characterisation:
The main character is Reverend John Ferguson. He is married to Mary and is involved in the forming of the Free Church of Scotland. He’s described by Mary’s relative as ‘rebellious’ due the fact he was spending all of the couple’s earnings on trying to form physical places of worship for the church, or his ‘Great Project’ as Mary called it. He’s also described as quite a serious man. John eventually comes across as quite the hypocrite. He takes on a job to evict the last remaining citizen off of one of the Scottish islands. He tries to justify it by saying the person would be ‘better off’ on the mainland but deep down knows he is only doing it for the money. He even agrees to take a gun should the person not be agreeable. So not only is he willing to throw away his morality for money, he is willing to get violent for it. Add in the fact that it turns out John is closeted? Which is blatantly against most branches of Christianity in this era? And then CHEATS on his wife? The guy is a mess. The problem with his characterisation is that he seemed to harbour no remorse for this infidelity. No remorse or inner turmoil at his sexuality which I’m fairly certain was illegal at this time, let alone against his faith. But he is capable of experiencing guilt and conflict about the fact he is getting involved in the Clearances? It felt very inconsistent.
Ivar was criminally underwritten. He has a complex backstory, with his family members all dying tragically either by starvation or drowning. He is a hermit living all alone with nobody but his old horse Pegi, a few sheep and a blind black cow. And yet, I cannot tell you what his personality is other than this sentimentality. He laughs at John’s attempts at pronouncing his language, but otherwise I have no idea what he likes or enjoys. He attaches himself first to a picture of Mary, then to John when he comes ashore injured and unconscious. It’s never explained why he likes him, what attracted him. Would he just fall in love with anybody with a pulse at this point? At no point is it even explored how his traumatic background has affected him, aside from him saying ‘I’m scared of the water’ once John confesses that he’s to be evicted. There are two mentions of his mother ‘drowning the pups’, which was never fully explained (pups as in puppies? There was never any mention of them owning a dog?), so this seemingly haunts him significantly out of all these horrific memories. Why? A metaphor for his mother’s children all dying? Maybe, but I have no idea. When he finds out about John’s real motive, even finds the GUN brought to make him do it, he forgives him like it was nothing. Now, is that just because he’s so desperate to hold on to him that he’d see past anything or did the author not have enough pages to get into that whole thing? Then he tries to shoot who he assumes is his evictors as they land on the beach, not knowing it was Mary? It had never been implied that Ivar was violent in any way. He’s big and strong, hardened and sinewy from illness and a life of outdoor work. But to kill someone? Again, it felt very out of character (out of what we were given, anyway).
Mary did not need a POV. I actually felt it was a huge waste of pages that could have been dedicated to fleshing out John, Ivar and their relationship. Even so, she loves John but does not love his religion and his dedication to it. She is the one who is wary and suspicious of John getting involved in the clearance, and even asks around about other people who were evicted to find out their fates. She is more grounded and realistic than John. She is self-conscious due to losing her teeth and wearing a denture, which is how she and John met due to them falling out during an accident and him finding them for her. The teeth serve as a symbol of John through most of the book, which was a little weird but interesting. Almost as if her vulnerability and lowered self-esteem with wearing them are now inherently linked to John and their marriage, which would then explain why she SUGGESTS THEY LIVE AS A THROUPLE? That part is still totally wild to me. Is she, too, magically okay with her husband being GAY (it’s heavily implied that sex between him and Mary was less than easy) and, at a minimum as far as she’s aware, emotionally cheating on her with Ivar? Is she like Ivar in that she will see past anything just to be with John? This guy who is kinda selfish and reckless? I again felt frustrated in that I didn’t feel I truly knew or understood the characters any better by the end of the book.
Any supporting characters were pretty forgettable.

World-Building:
This is the part that kept me reading. The religious tension and the political tension of the time were palpable. The descriptions of the island Ivar lives on (a fictional one inspired by Shetland and similar) were beautiful. The way Ivar’s extinct language was weaved through the book, and the unique words they had for very specific weathers which doubled as meanings for unquantifiable feelings, was genius and honestly stunning. There was an enchanting quality to watching Ivar’s life of caring for his animals, fishing and agriculture totally secluded from the rest of the world. There was also ruins of a Viking settlement on the island which added another interesting historical aspect due to the Scottish Islands connections with Scandinavia. I can only describe the world of Ivar’s island as atmospheric. Gorgeous, lush yet eery and desolate. I was less interested in the parts of the story based in the mainland. The glimpses we had of Mary living with her relatives, the journey for her to find John on the island, the beginning of the book where John meets his employer and we learn about the Clearances, all felt like they could have been discussed as flashbacks or in conversation rather than having chapters dedicated to them.

Prose\Plot:
The writing style was beautiful, which was another thing that kept me reading. The descriptive writing, the metaphors and symbolism, the pathetic fallacy were all wonderful. But the pacing was all over the place. The development of Ivar and John’s romance wasn’t really there for me. They show care for each other but never really anything more until suddenly, they’re having sex and it’s written about so jarringly and vaguely that I had to go back to see if I’d missed a page. The opportunities for some genuine sexual tension were everywhere. John watching Ivar absail down a cliff and being both impressed by him and scared out of his wits, Ivar and John being enclosed in a small hut for weeks on end learning to communicate and Ivar nursing John to health, John storming out after an argument about Mary and getting lost. But nowhere does John discuss sexual and physical attraction to Ivar. Nowhere does he feel conflict about it with his religious values or his marriage. Nowhere are there any angsty discussions on how Ivar would express these feelings in his language. See where I’m going with this? There could have been so many more near-misses or internal monologues about all of these things, but instead it’s just about John’s guilt for lying and Ivar quietly liking him being around. Therefore the slow burn just didn’t pay off for me. The scene where Ivar apparently stifles John’s sobbing with his hand and then ‘they didn’t speak again’ until they’d had sex (what type of sex I don’t know) was so blasé and glossed over I got a little bit mad. That could have been a BEAUTIFUL scene. When they’re having sex John just says Ivar smells of ‘smoke and fish’. Lovely… Couldn’t have utilised the very spring outside that John bathed in and had his accident, huh? That would have been pretty erotic. Then the ending… Ivar just jumps on a boat with them and his horse, leaving his animals and house behind. With the implied agreement that he, Mary and John are just going to live together with Mary fully aware that they’re shagging? WHAT? Absolutely nothing is resolved. I was left with more questions than answers. I was left craving scenes that I had to imagine in my own head rather than read. So overall, while I would try another of the author’s books, I was disappointed and feel this novel was a huge missed opportunity.

A powerful novel because of its incredible descriptions of how nature can weave into human nature, whether through its language richness or by what the eye sees, the skin feels ... I loved how solitude was portrayed, its relation to the environment. I loved how through this solitude, one could feel the need for human connection without being aware of it until it does happen. A beautiful and thought provoking novel about life, human connection. Highly recommended.
I received a digital copy of this novel from NetGalley and I have voluntarily written an honest review.

Clear by Carys Davies

Easily the best book I've read in a long time . A beautiful emotional read , set on an island.
Two men unable to understand each other are brought together in heart rendering situation one of them comes to a remote Scottish island as part of the 19th century clearences.
The story is told through the eyes of Ivar & John and is totally captivating .
I hope the author wins awards for this and gets the recognition she deserves.
This book has the potential of becoming a classic that should be read in many years to come.

Clear is so beautifully set within some very significant events. In the 19th Century evangelical worshippers moved away from the Church of Scotland to form the Free Church of Scotland. Also, there was a second wave of Scottish landowners driving their tenants from the land, choosing to make a better profit grazing sheep, know as the Highland Clearances. Our characters are deeply involved with these events. John Ferguson has been a minister in the Church of Scotland, but his conscience draws him away towards the Free Church. This leaves him without an income since the new church isn’t yet established. John’s wife Mary may be the answer, because her brother-in-law asks a landowner if he could offer John a job. The job has one purpose, travelling to a remote island in the North Sea close to Norway. There he has to evict the landowner’s last remaining tenant, a man named Ivar who is barely scratching a living with a handful of livestock. However, Ivar doesn’t speak English, but an old dialect that’s a mix of Norwegian and Gaelic. John has just one month till the boat returns to take both of them back to Shetland. How will he convince Ivar to leave?

The story is focused on the relationship these two men have to develop with each other and it starts in a way neither expect. The bailie’s house is empty as he’s already left the island so John plans to make it his base, but needs to find somewhere locally that he can wash. He finds a spring and decides to bathe, but he slips and falls down a cliff. Ivar finds the unconscious man and takes him to his own hut. As John slowly regains consciousness and begins his recovery, the two man have to work out a way of speaking to each other and eventually John has to explain what he’s there for. As we watch their relationship grow and how they work on communication, Mary has grown worried about John. She thinks he may have taken on the task without enough preparation and she decides to travel out there and join him. The narrative felt like being a fly on the wall to to these events. Once the three are together I had the strange feeling that this was really happening and I was simply watching history, bearing witness to the emotions flowing between them.

This is such a gentle story that contains so much. Instead of pushing an agenda or viewpoint, the author just lets it play out naturally. Nature is so much more than just a setting, it’s life itself. The island is mercurial, with it’s changeable weather creating the mood. Ivar lives entirely off this land, his life a routine of hard work and at home he spins wool or knits. Even the regular agent who collects rent for the landowner is paid in wool, feathers or wrack. Ivar is part of this island, a bear of a man with only his animals for company. There’s a purity to his life that’s almost spiritual, an interesting contrast to John’s organised religion. There’s so much going on under the surface of the story, told in the tiny details of everyday life: their gestures, the intimacies they share and how those connections change as a language is formed between them. It’s interesting to see the established dynamic of John and Ivar affecting how Mary settles into the cottage. The men’s connection brings the three of them into a unit, so that they don’t feel like a married couple and a lone man any more. Each of them forms a strong connection with each other and the landscape. I found reading this an almost meditative experience, because it’s so slow and calm. The ending came suddenly and was a shock.

Clear is a beautifully written novella set in 1843 and telling the story of a friendship that forms between two men who should be enemies. John Ferguson is one of many evangelical ministers who have broken away from their church to form the Free Church of Scotland. Having given up his job and his home to establish this new church, John is struggling financially and, out of desperation, accepts an offer of work from a landowner who wants him to travel to a remote Scottish island and evict the last remaining tenant from the land. Forced evictions like these, known as Clearances, have been happening all over the Scottish Highlands as landlords remove the people living on their estates so that they can use the land for other purposes such as sheep farming. It’s a traumatic and often cruel process and not something John is looking forward to being part of.

The man John will have to evict is Ivar, who has lived alone on his island in the far north of Scotland since the deaths of his remaining family members. It’s an isolated life, but Ivar is content and has his horse, Pegi, for company. One day, he finds a man unconscious on the beach under the cliffs and takes him to his home to nurse him back to health. This is John Ferguson, who has met with an accident soon after arriving on the island. Ivar finds a picture of John’s wife, Mary, in his belongings and becomes infatuated with her, the first woman he’s seen for a long time – but as the injured man begins to recover, Ivar switches his affections to John himself. He has no idea why John is there, however, and because the two men speak different languages, he’s unable to ask.

Language forms an important part of the novel. Ivar speaks only Norn, a now extinct language once spoken in Shetland and Orkney, and John speaks English with a small amount of Scots. Over the course of the book, we see how two men unable to communicate in words are still able to bond and connect until eventually they do begin to learn each other’s language. In her author’s note Davies explains how the novel was inspired by Jakob Jakobsen’s Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland and she scatters Norn words throughout the book with a glossary at the back. Norn appears to have been a fascinating language; John is surprised to discover how descriptive it is and how many different words there are for mist, fog, wind and other types of weather.

Some parts of the novel are written from the perspective of Mary, John’s wife, who becomes concerned about the work her husband has been sent to do – she’s heard that the evictions can be unpleasant and violent – and decides to follow him to the island. I enjoyed reading Mary’s story and thought her sections of the book perfectly complemented Ivar and John’s. Mary’s thread of the novel comes together with the others near the end, and although I’m not going to tell you how the book ends I can say that it wasn’t what I expected but I was quite happy with it!

Carys Davies’ writing is beautiful and also very readable and I found this a quick, absorbing read. For such a short book, there’s a lot packed inside it. It reminded me a lot of Claire Keegan’s novella Small Things Like These, so if you enjoyed one book I would recommend trying the other.

Clear is about the intersection of two very different lives: Ivar is the last inhabitant of a small island halfway between Scotland and Norway, and John Ferguson is the impoverished church minister who's been sent to evict him.

As this brief description suggests, Carys Davies takes the opportunity to cover a couple of interesting historical events in Clear. The first is the Highland Clearances, in which landowners evicted poor tenants from their land across the Highlands and islands of Scotland and replaced them with more profitable sheep farms. The second is the founding of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843, as a breakaway from the established Church of Scotland.

It's these two events that bring the men together on the remote, unnamed island. John Ferguson follows his principles to join the Free Church, but he's left without an income and without funds to set up and maintain his church. So he takes on an assignment for a landowner: just set aside one month to travel to the island, evict Ivar, conduct a survey to help the landowner plan his sheep farm, and he'll travel back home with enough money to support him and his wife Mary and to establish his church.

Of course, this being a novel, things don't go to plan. Soon after his arrival, John slips on a wet clifftop path and plunges into the sea. Ivar discovers his leather bag floating in the sea first, before coming across his half-dead body on a nearby beach. He nurses him back to health in his tiny cottage, and when John finally regains consciousness, he doesn't have the heart to tell him that he's come to evict him from the only home he's ever known.

Another complication is that John and Ivar do not share a language in common. John speaks English and, to a lesser extent, Scots, but Ivar speaks only the language of his island. John had brought with him a script written by someone with knowledge of a related Shetlandic language, explaining to Ivar the nature of his mission, but it was lost to the sea.

So begins the slow process of finding a common language by pointing to objects and noting down the words that Ivar uses for them. But languages don't always have neatly corresponding words—they reflect the preoccupations of their users. So Ivar's language has multiple words for different kinds of fog, different kinds of muddy bog, and John can't tell them apart. Sometimes, too, the words allow Ivar to achieve much deeper levels of emotional expression:

"If he'd been asked to describe his feelings he might have reached for that word in his language that described what happens when a rock is covered and uncovered by the sea—when, briefly, the water rises up and submerges it completely before it falls away again and reveals it. It was how Ivar felt when the wave of emotion crashed over him."

Ivar's dying language plays a large role in the novel, the mutual lack of comprehension acting both as a barrier and a facilitator of communication. It blocks John from conducting his business and forces him to communicate with Ivar on a deeper level, to see him as a human being instead of as an object to be removed.

The language also reinforces the brutality of what's being done to Ivar. When we hear of tenant farmers being evicted, it's easy to think of them as temporary residents whose lease has ended. But Ivar's people have been on this island long enough to develop an ancient and complex language that bears almost no relationship to Scottish and little relationship even to the languages of other nearby islands. That can only happen over the course of centuries. His eviction will destroy not just his life, but an entire culture.

As they spend more time together, slowly finding ways to communicate and understand each other, John and Ivar develop a deep and close human connection. But lying in a nearby house is the gun and box of supplies that John brought from the hated landowner, and meanwhile the end of the month is drawing nearer and bringing the next ship with a man who will expect to take Ivar away to the mainland. And John's wife Mary, who has discovered the real danger of John's mission, is on her way to the island to rescue him. I won't spoil it for you in case you plan to read the book, but it builds to quite a dramatic conclusion. There was a surprising twist towards the end too, which I found very beautiful.

Overall, this was a moving and beautifully told story of an unlikely bond between two very different people on opposing sides of a historic struggle. The characters are beautifully drawn, and the plot unfolds at just the right pace. I felt drawn to Ivar but also sorry for John and fascinated to see how his moral conflict would play out. I was even rooting for Mary, who is more of a supporting character in the tale. And when you add beautiful descriptions of nature and of Ivar's dying language, the result is a memorable and highly accomplished novel.

An utterly beautiful, heart-wrenching, emotive novel that will stay with me for a long time. Carys Davies has produced a work of art with her latest novel 'Clear'. It's a slight book, but it packs a huge punch. Told through the eyes of two men, whose paths cross when one of them is sent to evict the other from a remote Scottish island, as part of the 19th Century Clearances. Ivar has lived a solitary, peaceful existence for years, dreading the time when he will be forced from the only home he's ever known. John is desperate to make a home for himself and his new wife, and believes he has no choice but to follow the orders he's been given. But when John and Ivar meet, the two strike up a close friendship that changes both their lives. A truly extraordinary historical novel, remembering a vanished way of life.

This is such a moving story. It is set in 1843, the year of the Great Disruption when roughly one third of Scottish ministers left their church to form the new Free Church of Scotland. John Ferguson is one of those ministers. He finds himself impoverished as he’s given up his living and the home he shares with his wife to establish this new church. To earn money, he accepts an offer from a landowner’s factor to travel to a remote island in Shetland where he will inform the remaining tenant that he must leave his home forever. Until now, despite reading a great deal about the Lowland and Highland Clearances, I don’t believe I knew that their reach extended to Shetland.

Ivar is the one remaining tenant on the island. The factor hasn’t visited for years. His family have all either died at the fishing or left for Canada. He has been on his own for a long time. His life is harsh but he counts his blessings -

“I have the cliffs and the skerries and the birds. I have the white hill and the round hill and the peaked hill. I have the clear spring water and the rich good pasture that covers the tilted top of the island like a blanket. I have the old black cow and the sweet grass that grows between the rocks, I have my great chair and my sturdy house. I have my spinning wheel and I have the teapot and I have Pegi” his horse)…..He would soon have John Ferguson too.

This is a beautifully woven story. It introduces us to Norn, a now extinct language that was once widely spoken in the Shetlands, the last known speaker dying in 1850. Ivar speaks only Norn and John speaks only English with a smattering of Scots. Over the weeks they are together, as their relationship deepens so does their knowledge of each other’s languages.

The end of the book comes suddenly and took me by surprise. We don’t know what becomes of any of the characters, Ivar, John and his wife, Mary, but we can suppose. This is a reflective, moving, gentle, well written book that will stay with me for a long time.

With thanks to NetGalley and Granta Publications for a review copy.

Here's a story set during harsh times in a bleak and desolate land, yet written in delicate and beautiful prose. It's hard to tear yourself away from Ivar and John Ferguson; this short book is best to be savoured in one sitting. Many things are left unspoken, maybe that's why it resonates so powerfully with me.
A memorable read, and it reminded me of Claire Keegan.

Clear by Carys Davies tells the story of John Ferguson, a preacher struggling to make ends meet, who is tasked with evicting the last resident of a remote Scottish island—a farmer named Ivar. Set against the backdrop of the Highland Clearances, a dark chapter in Scottish history during the 1700s and 1800s when families were forcibly removed to make way for sheep farming, this novel introduced me to a period of history I was unfamiliar with, yet found fascinating to read.

Ivar has lived in isolation for years, his only companions being his sheep, a horse, and a blind cow. As John hits a barrier in to carrying out his mission, both men gradually pick up words and phrases in each other's language and forge a unique way to understand each other. Anyone learning a language or the art of translation will appreciate the intricacies of their exchange and the process in which they try to communicate.

<I>Not knowing the right words made him feel as far away and separate from Ivar as he had ever felt since the day he'd arrived.</I>

Clear is a short but striking novel, where every word feels deliberate and meaningful. Excited to read more by Carys Davies!

4.5 stars

Have you ever wished that Burial Rites had been written by Claire Keegan? If yes, you are in the right place. If no, you can give this one a miss.

It is mid-19th century, and John, a minister of the new Free Church of Scotland, is struggling financially due to the recent break with the established church. He takes a commission from a local landowner to go and persuade the last inhabitant of a remote Shetland island to give up his land, giving us a glimpse into the realities of the Highland and Island clearances. Ivar, the said last inhabitant, buried his entire family on the island, and his solace is disturbed by the arrival of John. As it is a book written by a white woman in the year of our lord 2025, homoromantic longing ensues. Meanwhile, John's plucky wife Mary is on a quest to rescue her husband from the island ...

Told in three narrative voices (Ivar, John and Mary), this novel excels at creating a sense of place and atmosphere. If you enjoy playing Dear Esther or The Long Dark, you might like the brooding bleak beauty of the island, and the glimpses of urban Scotland we get in Mary's chapters. The novel is reserved and full of half-tones. I felt that Mary's chapters were the most engaging, and her perspective opens up the otherwise insular world of the book. We see snippets of Edinburgh, Aberdeen and other Scottish cities, and learn what life might have been like for a middle-aged and quietly strong-minded bride. The fact that we learn much more of Mary's backstory (compared to John and Ivar) helps her chapters stand out. I wish the entire novel was just about Mary, or at least told entirely from her perspective, it would have made for a more innovative story structure.

Instead, more than two thirds of the narrative follow the non-events on the island. John gets a concussion, and Ivar nurses him back to health. Ivar does not know that John is a landlord's agent; neither is he aware of his mission to dispossess Ivar. Ivar is one of the last speakers of Norn, a Nordic Shetland language, and he slowly teaches John the language. They slowly develop feelings for each other (never descending into open sexual longing, mind you). It is all quite dreary and dull. The gay narrative bears all the signs of being written by a (straight?) cis woman, if you know what I mean. The language is not very exciting; the whole novel is written in standard English (despite making a point of John's complicated relationship with his mother tongue, Scots), and we get occasional words in Norn when John learns them. Ivar was the most disappointing and cliche character for me, often descending into the word type of 'magic minority' (in this case, marginalised islander) trope. He is a gentle giant, untouched and unspoilt by civilization. He is not allowed to have three-dimensional feelings or a personality beyond slowly falling for John. He has few thoughts about his vanished community, or the world beyond his island. He loves his land, and then he loves John. Yawn.

Although the novel is quite well-researched, I felt a hint of exoticisation of 'wild' Scotland (the power dynamic here is complex, as the author is Welsh).

Good prose and sense of place don't compensate for a well-trotted plot and themes.

A short and quiet story, that I found beautiful and atmospheric. The characters were complex and interesting. The afterword filled in the history and language used - which was helpful.

I didn't think this was the sort of book I'd really like, it sounded a bit 'historical' and rather worthy in the description, but it took me totally by surprise when it was such a page turner from about half way through when the wife starts to make her way to the remote island where her husband has been isolated for months. The setting is very darkly atmospheric and I enjoyed the island setting much more than I expected. The harsh poverty of the life there, living with almost no contact with the outside world was fascinating and the cold and the harsh weather was palpably present throughout. But the transformational quality of the experience was what makes the book and makes you want to know more about what happens next to the unique trio and their relationships. It's rare to read a book where you really don't know what will happen next, but where the inevitability of the next series of events seem obvious once you've had them laid out for you. It's hard to explain how good this book is without including a load of spoilers but it's uplifting by the end and it leaves you feeling you know more about something, which is quite a rare quality in a book. Loved it.

*A big thank-you to Carys Davis, Granta Publications, and NetGalley for arc in exchange for my honest review.*
Set in 1840s on a remote Scottish island, in the background the novel depicts most complicated fate of people who were forcibly evicted from their farms and had them destroyed in order to make space for sheep to graze. That was a tragic moment in histroy which prompted forced migration and more poverty added to already existing problems.
The novel is short but intense and one of those in which every word counts. Ms Davies knows how to give each sentence a meaning and draw a reader to her prose and characters. This work of fiction was perfectly edited and, to quote a classic, there are just as many words as there should be.