1843. On a remote Scottish island, Ivar, the sole occupant, leads a life of quiet isolation until the day he finds a man unconscious on the beach below the cliffs. The newcomer is John Ferguson, an impoverished church minister sent to evict Ivar and turn the island into grazing land for sheep. Unaware of the stranger's intentions, Ivar takes him into his home, and in spite of the two men having no common language, a fragile bond begins to form between them. Meanwhile on the mainland, John's wife Mary anxiously awaits news of his mission.
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.
