There’s a tweet that gets reposted every couple of months, basically anytime a new book is mentioned online, usually in connection to a film being optioned and/or cast:
While the latter fake title gestures to any number of lurid thrillers that make up the airport bookstore industry, the former fake title is a more direct allusion to Claire Keegan’s 2021 novel Small Things Like These, a very fine novel that became an unexpected commercial success.1 The film adaptation (starring Cillian Murphy) just made its festival debut in Berlin, and so I’m sure I’ll be seeing that tweet at least a couple more times once the movie makes its way stateside, or if another book called The [x] In All the [y] comes out. But besides books taking their title construction from Keegan, we may also be seeing more books follow Keegan’s artistic practice: slim, tightly constructed novels of morality. As opposed to the strain of contemporary novels where an author stand-in character makes a vague resolution to try to be a better person going forward (Jenny Offill, come on down! You too, Sally Rooney! Ben Lerner, there’s room for you to squeeze in!), Small Things Like These concerns a person in a compromised position making a personally deleterious decisions – taking a real action! – out of a sense of a higher moral purpose.
It’s just a short hop across the Irish Sea to get from Keegan’s Ireland to Carys Davies’ native Wales, and a bit longer of a trip to the northern Islands of Scotland, the setting of her latest novel, Clear. But Keegan’s structure is hearty enough to survive the trip: Clear is a concise novel about fundamentally good people stuck in a bad spot, weighing the need to just get by in a dreary, degraded world of capital against their inner sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. Set in mid 19th century Scotland, the novel follows John Ferguson, a minister for the newly established Free Church of Scotland. In desperate need of money for his parish, John decides to take on a job that, while personally distasteful, will at least pay the bills for bit: evicting the last inhabitant from a remote island so the land can be turned over to pasture, part of a countrywide system of ‘clearances’ enacted by wealthy landowners at the time. As a man of the cloth, though, John quickly runs into trouble on the wild and wooly island, slipping and knocking himself out, and is rescued by that one inhabitant, a native named Ivar. Ivar tends to John as he recovers, and once John is back on his feet, they develop a bond, even though they can only communicate, initially, through hand signs and approximations. Because of that communication barrier – and also a bit of sheepishness – John can’t (or won’t) explain exactly why he’s on the island, a looming revelation that hangs over the development of Ivar and John’s friendship. Meanwhile, back in less wild climes, John’s wife Mary begins to fear the worst about her frail, extremely sincere husband surviving the eviction of a possibly hostile islander, and decides to set out for the island herself, hopefully grabbing John and leaving the sordid business of clearing the land to somebody else.
Clear is at its best in its examination of language, its probing of how words and phrases circumscribe the natural world, and where translation necessarily falls short. Even the title, Clear, works in multiple ways; primarily, John is sent to clear the island, but there is also a sense that, among various opacities, things can be made clear between different people with enough effort and goodwill. John takes an intense interest in Ivar’s language, attempting to build a kind of dictionary of Ivar’s ancient, Norse-inflected tongue, but there are minute, almost impressionist ideas built into Ivar’s language that actually can’t be rendered in English: the differences between kinds of fogs that sit over the island, the particular hue of the water at a certain kind of day.
[Ferguson] engaged in a desultory to-and-fro with Ivar, asking the big bearded islander what words he used for the things they could see around them. The easiest ones were those for birds and fish and vegetation … Colors were easy, too, because they were there, in front of his eyes on the animals and the plants … Other words were harder because there were so man to do with the variations in the weather and wind and in the behavior of the water that seemed to mean something very distinct to Ivar but that John Ferguson couldn’t confidently define, or that left him flummoxed – words like gilgal and skreul, pulter and yog, fester and dreetslengi, all of which appeared to have a precise and particular meaning that was beyond his experience or powers of observation; all of which, with a slight sense of defeat, he translated collectively as “a rough sea”
This inquiry into language reflects back on the simultaneous foolishness and hope of John’s longtime project of translating the Bible into Scots-English for his parishioners: the words on the page can be rendered literally, but there is a spirit (or a Word) behind the words that also needs to be expressed. It probably can never be put down just right, but one does have to try.
John Ferguson being nice and decent is expected enough; he’s a breakaway minister, after all. Ivar is the more surprising beacon of goodness; his rough, worn workman’s exterior hides an intensely domestic and caring interior, a lonely soul lucking upon his first visitor in decades. Ivar cares for the ailing John like a child at first, literally helping him walk again, and then, as he and John fashion a language between themselves, Ivar develops more intimate feelings for him: “It was as if he’d never fully understood his solitude until now – as if, with the arrival of John Ferguson, he had been turned into something he’d never been or hadn’t been for a long time: part brother and part sisyer, part son and part daughter, part mother and part father, part husband and part wife.” John, despite being a devoted husband, also becomes somewhat enraptured in a kind of fantasy world with Ivar, a kind of ascetic existence built on mutual care and a shared, deeper understanding fostered by whatever language they can share: “When they got home, they ate a pudding made from fish wrapped in the stomach of a slaughtered sheep, and in the evening they went out again, for a stroll, and Ivar paued at a spot at the base of the wall below the house through which a stream ran. All these things – the field, the mist, the pudding, the wall with the stream running through it – John Ferguson had words for now, and knew that they were different from the words Ivar had that described other sorts of fields, and other kinds of mist; a pudding that was not wrapped in the stomach of a sheep; a wall with no stream running through it.”
To produce a work like this – an essentially very earnest story – without devolving into mawkishness is difficult; and while Davies doesn’t get overly sentimental, there is, by the end, a sense that even though Davies has followed the same template as Keegan, she does not quite reach the same final sense of earned moral satisfaction. Somewhere along the line, Clear becomes a novel of nice people doing nice things for each other with hardly any sense of threat; the ending, in particular, is a bow too neatly wrapped for all but those with especially rose-tinted glasses. Mary arrives on the island and almost immediately not only recognizes but also fully accepts the bond between her husband and a wooly islander; whatever conflict might have been occasioned by her appearance is deus-ex-machina-ed away by everyone’s bonhomie. One can imagine, reaching out beyond the confines of the book, a difficulty these characters might face after their final choice; but Davies is more focused on a kind of magical thinking, where, in fact, every little thing will be alright. It is perhaps the last straw of earnestness that breaks the camel’s back of the book, though I find myself more fondly remembering the first three quarters of the novel, and, in less cynical moments, thinking to myself, in response to the thought that it couldn’t possibly end up like that: but wouldn’t it be nicer if it did? Maybe a better world is imaginable? Or at least a better way to live in the world we have? If you squint a bit, you just might make that better world out, though you might not have the words for it.
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Novellas in hardcover! Nobody sells novellas!