Clear

The Last Man on the Island

The island has been sold. This is the economic fact that John Ferguson — a Church of Scotland minister, sent from the mainland with the instructions of the man who has purchased the island — must communicate to the last person remaining on it. The community that once lived there is gone; they have been cleared, compelled to leave, their centuries of habitation dissolved in the legal transaction that converted their home into property.

The remaining man is called Ivar. He is old, or perhaps not so old but aged by solitude. He has lived alone on the island since everyone else left — how long, exactly, is not clear, because time functions differently when you are its only witness. He speaks only Gaelic. John Ferguson speaks no Gaelic. Their first meeting is a study in the specific comedy and pathos of two people trying to communicate across an absolute language barrier: gesture, expression, the pragmatics of physical presence where words are unavailable.

Carys Davies’s novella is 192 pages long and it is exactly the right length. The economy is absolute — every sentence is doing necessary work, and the work it is doing is consistently more than it appears.

Language as Home

Clear is most essentially a novel about language — not language as a communication tool but language as a form of dwelling. Ivar’s Gaelic is not merely his means of communicating; it is the medium in which his world exists. The names he has for the island’s features, the stories he knows about the land, the specific quality of his inner life — all of this is conducted in Gaelic, in a form of consciousness that has no English equivalent.

John Ferguson cannot access this world. He has the material task — telling Ivar the island is sold, that he must leave — and he cannot perform it. He can gesture, point, mime. He cannot explain. He cannot answer questions. He cannot tell Ivar what will happen to him after he leaves, or where he might go, or what awaits him on the mainland. The communication between them is, therefore, primarily physical and emotional — presence, attention, the quality of how two people inhabit shared space.

This limitation is the novel’s central creative constraint, and Davies uses it with complete intelligence. What happens between John and Ivar across the weeks that John stays on the island — waiting for a boat that may not come, waiting for a weather window, gradually learning to be in the same space — is communicated not through dialogue but through action, observation, and the specific rendering of attention.

The Clearances

The Highland Clearances — the process by which Scottish landowners removed tenant farming communities from the land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, converting it to sheep farming and later deer stalking — is a historical event of enormous significance for Scotland and its diaspora. The Clearances broke up communities that had existed for centuries, forced people to emigrate or move to coastal crofting townships, and contributed to the depopulation of much of rural Scotland.

Davies does not narrate this history; she renders one of its specific human consequences. The island that Ivar has been alone on was once a community — he remembers them, knows their names, occupies a house among houses that are empty and silently present. His solitude is not chosen but imposed, the residue of a process he had no power to resist. He remained, for reasons the novel suggests without explaining fully.

John Ferguson, the minister sent to remove the last resistance to the new ownership, is himself implicated in the system that produced the Clearances — the Church of Scotland was often the institution through which landlord authority was exercised over tenant communities. His presence on the island is not innocent; the novel knows this and so does he, in ways he does not fully acknowledge.

The Two Men

What happens between John and Ivar across the length of their enforced cohabitation is the novel’s subject, and Davies renders it with the specific restraint that the material demands: no sentimentality, no dramatic confrontation that would be impossible given the language barrier, no resolution that ignores the material facts of power and dispossession.

What they do share: physical space, practical tasks (food, shelter, fire), attention to the island’s particular beauty and harshness, and a quality of presence — of being seen by another person, even across an unbridgeable gap — that Ivar has not had in years. Whether this constitutes friendship, or something less nameable, the novel wisely refuses to specify.

Davies’s Prose

Carys Davies is a short fiction writer whose compressed intensity is perfectly suited to the novella form. Her prose has a quality of precision and sensory richness that recalls Penelope Fitzgerald — the ability to deliver enormous amounts of information and atmosphere in sentences that don’t call attention to themselves as doing so. The island — its weather, its light, its landscape — is rendered with the specificity of someone who has looked carefully at a particular place and found the words for it.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — One of the most formally perfect short novels in recent memory. The Highland Clearances rendered through a single, irreplaceable human encounter.