A jewel ... Davies’s prose, bone-clean and achingly simple, moves with hymn-like richness as it names the humblest props, rituals and nourishments of the farmer’s life ... Splendidly imagined.
The storytelling is sophisticated and playful, swooping back across decades to Mary’s childhood and John’s vocation, and among different points of view ... Deeply interested in language and particularly in words for the natural world ... Clear contemplates fictional resuscitations, opening itself, and its readers, to the ghosts of lost ideas through John’s dawning understanding and love of Ivar’s words. The novel is bold and inevitably not flawless — the ending gestures toward an unconvincing resolution — but if you like wild writing and high-stakes thinking in small, polished form, you’ll like this.
Dramatically stark ... In sparse but often gorgeous prose, Clear chronicles the surprising bond that develops between these two men, first through Ivar’s tender ministrations to the injured stranger ... Davies manages to pack a great deal of power into her compact tale.
Davies’ language is contemporary, but there is an older one in play here ... The late turn will seem too sudden to some readers, and they might consider the rushed, sheepish ending that follows to be a mercy. Others might be pleased by the surprise, or even heartened as Davies insists that amid strong customs, across thick obstructions, people can choose their own paths.
It’s Mary, growing anxious on the mainland, whose bold actions will carry Davies’s memorable novel to its unexpected, delicately radical end – an end that conjures new, shared beginnings.
A lucid and stylish prose writer, Davies is excellent at revealing characters through the language they use and through the gestures and tonal shifts that betray their weaknesses, their prejudices and hollow sentiments ... Though the denouement pushes the reader’s credulity to its limits – suspension of belief be damned.
An astonishing novel ... It is in the description of the shared outcrop of uncommon ground that this novel excels ... It very briskly captures character like a silhouette.
Davies treads familiar ground. Her melancholic stories always focus on dreamers: usually foolish but noble men whose encounters with the wilderness disturb their sense of identity. Unlikely friendships blossom, misunderstandings occur and there are uncomfortable questions about displacement. But what’s tentative between Ivar and John suddenly becomes too literal ... The sense of forced hope introduces a false note. I’m afraid it kept ringing in my ears long after the final page.
At its finest, Clear is a love letter to the scorching power of language, a power that Davies has long understood. She writes with amazing economy: in a few words she can summon worlds ... Clear’s final pages feel rushed, their rewards as yet unearned. Davies is a writer of immense talent and deep humanity, capable of balancing devastating audacity with equally devastating restraint. In Clear, she has allowed restraint too heavy a hand. A longer novel might have produced a deeper and more satisfying brew.
With her characteristically buoyant prose and brisk sense of plotting, Davies crafts a humane tale about individuals struggling to maintain dignity beneath competing systems of disenfranchisement. But while a lesser author might allow their characters to be terminally lashed by these historical travesties, Davies infuses John, Mary, and Ivar with refreshingly fantastical levels of creativity and grace, which helps them find a startling new way to avert disaster. A deft and graceful yarn about language, love, and rebellion against the inhumane forces of history.
