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Carys Davies: ‘Dispossession and the theft of land was very much on my mind’

Author’s latest novel Clear is set during the forced evictions of the Scottish Highlands

Carys Davies: 'I definitely think we all have our pandemic book'

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Edel Coffey
Sat Mar 9 2024 - 05:00

In the period between the mid-18th century and mid-19th century, Scotland underwent what is known as the Scottish or Highland Clearances, which were the forced eviction of people who lived on the western islands and Highlands to make way for sheep grazing.

The practise provides the action for Clear, the new novel by Welsh-born, Edinburgh-based author Carys Davies. Set in 1843 on a remote Scottish island, Clear tells the story of Ivar, the sole occupant of the island, and John, the church minister who, in desperate need of money, takes on the job of travelling to the island to evict Ivar. When John falls from the cliffs, however, Ivar nurses him back to health over several weeks. Meanwhile, John’s wife Mary is determined to create a new life for them, one not dominated or curtailed by society or religion.

Where did Davies get the idea to write about the Clearances?

“No other book has come to me in quite the same way as this book,” she says via a Zoom call. “More than 10 years ago I was in the lovely old reading room in the Scottish national library in Edinburgh. It was a winter’s afternoon and I had been working all day and having a fairly bad day. I always sit in the same alcove, which is the alcove where they keep the dictionaries and I came across this dictionary in a language I had never heard of before. I was just enchanted by this language, which turned out to be Norn, an old Norse dialect that used to be spoken on Orkney and Shetland but started to die out in the middle of the 15th century when the islands were pawned to Scotland by the Danish king, and was gradually replaced by Scots.

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“I sort of lived with this dictionary for about a decade. I used to go back to it and read more words and write down the definitions. I was sort of dreaming about this place and very slowly over the years I could see the island and eventually I could see this man and I knew that he was alone there. I knew that the language had died out by the time these words in the dictionary were collected in the 1890s, but it seemed to me very possible that someone living on a really remote island by himself could still plausibly be speaking something that resembled this old Norse language in the middle of the 1850s. I didn’t know anything about the Scottish Clearances, the Highland Clearances, but the more I started to read about the clearances I thought, yes, this is what’s happening to Ivar.”

But then she needed to answer the question of who was evicting Ivar. The other great social change that was happening around the same time in Scotland was the split in the Scottish church in 1843, when a third of all Scottish ministers broke away from the established church to form the new Free Church, which had the disadvantage of making many ministers poor overnight. “And so my minister John Ferguson strolled on to the page,” she says, “and everything just seemed to fall into place.”

The book is beautifully written, literary in style but also with an Edgar Allen-Poe-esque inbuilt pacemaker that makes the experience of reading this slim novel feel as tense as a thriller.

Despite being set in the mid-19th century, many of the book’s central themes are reflective of contemporary issues, such as housing, dispossession and loneliness. “In [my previous novel] West I had been writing about the driving out of the Native Americans by the settlers so that whole thing of dispossession and the theft of land was very much on my mind.”

[ West by Carys Davies review: a morally complex novel ]

The isolation of John and Ivar on the island also recalls the isolation of the pandemic. “I definitely think we all have our pandemic book,” she says, “and it’s impossible now to say would I have written this book the way I’ve written it if it weren’t for those times. It really intensified that need for some sort of physical connection and I did want to try to capture some of that.”

Through John Ferguson she also explores many facets of religion and faith, particularly the idea of providence that was popular at the time. “I do think the doctrine of providence is an awful one, the idea that we can’t change things is deeply awful and I suppose that’s what my books are always about, a small group of characters who come to some sort of personal reckoning with these larger forces that they’re up against. I’ve been rereading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which at one point refers to Calvinism as a terrible joke we all used to believe in.”

Davies says it was never her aim to criticise the church, however. She grew up as a Methodist and married a Quaker. “I’m not religious, I don’t believe in God but I’m very interested in religion and morality and love and conscience and where all of those things overlap and complicate each other. I think it’s very easy to mock people for their religion. I did attend Quaker meetings all through my 30s and 40s and I’m very attracted to the kindness and compassion and non-judgmental approach to religion. I think most of the people there knew that I didn’t believe in God and it didn’t matter. It was more important that they stood up for social justice and the frail and the fragile in society and that was very attractive to me.”

Aside from John and Ivar, Clear has a wonderfully independent and pragmatic female character in the form of John’s wife, Mary. “I love Mary’s resourcefulness within the confines of her time. What I would say about my historical women is that I don’t want to make them anachronistically independent. I remember being at a literary festival for my first book West where there’s a 10-year-old girl called Bess who is ferociously independent and plucky but somebody in the audience said to me, couldn’t you have given Bess a little more agency? And I thought, she’s 10 and it’s 1812, so no, I really couldn’t. But I think she’s got a lot of agency – she does drag a dead body and dig a hole for it and not tell anybody.”

Davies grew up in Wales, where her grandfather was a coal miner, but moved to England when she was 10. “Then I moved to the United States for 11 years and now I’m in Edinburgh so I’ve always felt like a bit of an outsider, ever since leaving Wales. But I think I like that on the whole, I like having that slight distance.”

[ Carys Davies wins Frank O’Connor short story award ]

Distance is also one of the reasons she writes historical fiction. “I seem to need some sort of imaginative distance from the things I write about. Historical fiction gives you that distance and somehow that feels necessary.”

Clear is Davies’ third novel and she has also published two collections of short stories. Among the many prizes she has won are the Wales Book Of The Year, The Sunday Times 2020 Novel Of The Year and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award for her collection The Redemption of Galen Pike, but she only started writing fiction in her mid-30s.

“I was living in the United States, I had four small children and [was] going a little crazy. I had been working as a freelance journalist and then I discovered the great American short story writers Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Lorrie Moore and Amy Bloom and it was a complete revelation. I thought, this is what I want to try to do. It wasn’t until my fourth child had left home that I wrote my first novel because they just take so much sustained concentration. You can’t keep doing them in little bits here and there. Writing can take so long and so much patience and there are so many days where nothing good happens.

“I think all those other things I do, like gardening and knitting, I go to them because you’re always guaranteed a result. I remember reading that Charlotte Brontë enjoyed cleaning and that just spoke to me so much because if I can’t write this novel I’ll go and clean the windows!”

Clear by Carys Davies is published by Granta