"Clear": No Man Is an Island
"Clear": No Man Is an Island
On Carys Davies' latest novella, with a close look at its challenging and divisive ending.
Clear, Carys Davies (2024)
In her three novels (each remarkable in its own way), Carys Davies travels to places she’s never physically set foot. In her debut novel, West, Davies set off with an amateur dinosaur hunter across untamed America; in The Mission House, she sent a young Englishman to India, without any stops at the usual clichés; in her latest book, Clear, Davies brings a priest to a desolate island inhabited by one man, his animals, and his memories. Asked in a recent interview about these alien settings, Davies said, “It’s as if I need some sort of distance, in time or space, and very often in both, to see things clearly.” About the foreign internal setting of the male mind in each of her books, she said:
“Just as I need some sort of distance from myself in terms of time and space, I need some kind of distance from my own personality; some way of worrying about the things I worry about, but in someone’s else’s head.”
This need for space is made manifest in Clear, where John Ferguson — a church minister with a congregation and a wife in material need — is sent to evict the sole inhabitant of a small island off the north of Scotland. The year is 1843; the schism rending apart John’s church and the land clearances that will scar Scotland’s history are time specific; yet something about the lucidity of Davies’ prose and the concerns of her central character make this book feel wonderfully and surprisingly contemporary. This effect is brought into sharpest focus by the book’s ending, but we’ll come back to that.
Clear carries no epigraph, but it could well have been introduced with John Donne’s poem “No Man Is an Island”, although the imagery might be a little too on the nose. As John arrives on the rain-lashed island, the desolation of that place and the prospect of his isolation there is defied by his dependence on others. He relies on other men to row him ashore, some of them to carry his box onto the island, a box containing provisions given to him by his employer and his wife, and he thanks God for “delivering” him. When the story is set in motion by an accident that leaves John naked and unconscious, he becomes mortally dependent on the only other human there.
This other man is Ivan, whom John has been sent to clear out on behalf of the landowner. John is a man with a spiritual mission to deliver the good news of the Gospels, sent on an earthly mission to deliver the bad news of eviction. The irony, like so much subtext here, is never stressed. Davies confidently leaves room on her page for readers to do their own exploring. Breadcrumbs are dropped throughout for the reader to follow towards possible meaning, such as the clever fact that the speech evicting Ivar “had been written out on the back of the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares”.
Clear might lack the bustle and density of life found in Davies’ previous books, but this is no failing — this is the pitch-perfect matching of style with subject. The prose is as austere as the book’s setting, leaving an appropriate feeling of space so that we feel as John and Ivar do: surrounded by an expanse of grass and ocean across which a cold wind blows. This economy of language means that in chapters set on the mainland with John’s wife, we feel the press of all that living in contrast to the scarcity on the island. And despite the book’s sparseness, there is so much life here. There’s joy, love, pain, comradery, and even a lovely bit of semi-postmodern fun at one point, a sly wink of a twinkling eye when Davies obliquely comments on her own story and its potential shortcoming, before quickly upending it.
It’s yet another irony in Clear that its restraint with words also imbues them with the power to concretise the abstract. Ivar is moved by the way that words can turn “a fine sea mist” or “the cold north-easterly wind” into “solid things on a piece of paper you could touch”. Words also make most solid the relationship unfurling between Ivar and John, seeming “to connect their lives in the strongest possible way”. And this is a power that works in the reverse as well: after the words of the Gospels and the eviction notice are washed off the paper by the sea, John ceases to be either a priest or Ivar’s evictor.
As with all of Davies’ books, there’s a lot to love in Clear. And as with all of Davies’ books, the ending will be divisive. I was unconvinced by the last pages of West, feeling that so many coincidences can work in a short story, but when stretched to a novella, the hand of the writer can be seen puppeteering the plot and its characters. The Mission House was a stronger effort at landing the plane, but there was still some turbulence as the wheels touched down. On my first reading of Clear, I couldn’t shake the feeling of anachronism, of today being pulled back ahistorically into yesterday. The suggestion of a “throuple” — along with the remarkably evolved attitudes required of such a set-up — reminded me of the recent Google Gemini quarrel, in which the AI cast Asian women and African-American men as Nazis and America’s founding fathers.
Part of the problem is that Davies decides at the end to let go of the leash with which she restrained her subtext. The latent eroticism of two men sharing the intimacy of language worked so well as a dimension of the silence and breaths between words. The internal rhythms of both men create dissonance and harmony at different times, a music most powerful when it plays non-diegetically. When the subtext is made manifest in physical intimacy, some of that power is diminished, and the open-ended, multifaceted question becomes a narrower answer. Had the romance remained a suggestion rather than an assertion, the dénouement — which positions its three central characters as primogenitors of today’s polyamorous Gen-Z — might have felt a little less jarring.
On reflection, however, I’ve come to see the ending of Clear as a challenge, a serious question about what we want literature to do. We’re often subjected to hard-hearted and boneheaded tirades against “historically inaccurate” fiction, as if a novel should be able to stand in for a textbook. Fiction’s first loyalty is not to a brutalist verisimilitude, though there is a place for questions of artistic responsibility and historical fact. What fiction is fundamentally concerned with is ideas, which in literature often take the form of “What if...?” If you want facts and data, look elsewhere. We turn to fiction not for knowledge but for wisdom. Art is doing something other — something arguably greater — than what history as an academic discipline is up to.
Clear may not show us a literally true, aesthetically indifferent, depiction of reality, but it shows us a reality that might exist given the right conditions. We are shown the world not as it is, but as it could be. Ultimately, Clear is not attempting to rewrite yesterday by the light of today; it’s attempting, in part, to understand today through the lens of yesterday, and who we are through who we could be. This is one of the highest aims of fiction: to worry about the things that worry us, but in someone else’s head.
Marginalia, plur. noun:
“In getting my books, I have always been solicitous of an ample margin … for the facility it affords me of penciling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.”
~ Edgar Allan Poe