"Clear": No Man Is an Island

On Carys Davies' latest novella, with a close look at its challenging and divisive ending.

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 ministe…