John arrives on the island, and, exploring on his first morning there, falls off a cliff. The story is simple after that: Ivar finds and cares for John; as John heals, he and Ivar become close; John postpones the brutal act that is his purpose on the island; and then Mary comes in search of her missing husband.
But the storytelling is sophisticated and playful, swooping back across decades to Mary’s childhood and John’s vocation, and among different points of view. We leap between John’s and Ivar’s voices on the island, to Mary now and in the past, and, at the moment of John’s accident, into a second-person voice and a glorious, anachronistic aerial view unknown to the 19th-century gaze: “If you’d been up in the island above the sky that morning with the gannets … you would have seen his tiny black figure leaving the Baillie house and making its way across patches of pink thrift and lush green pasture.”
This is a novel of aftermath, the island’s lifeways over and its community gone. It’s a “Robinson Crusoe” in reverse, where, rather than inventing imperial capitalism, the man alone on the island thinks outside modern structures of knowledge and power. There’s no nostalgia, just playful attention to time and place.
“Clear” is deeply interested in language and particularly in words for the natural world. John cannot distinguish different fogs and mists for which Ivar has terms. “He still couldn’t differentiate, for example, between the great number of words that to him seemed to denote ‘a rough sea.’ Nor could he separate a gob from a gagl, a degi from a dyapl, a dwog from a diun.” John’s alienated gaze misses what matters for survival; his theological scholarship doesn’t help here.
Davies has done her research and these are real words in a real dead language. “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.
