March is Reading Wales Month, hosted by Karen of Booker Talk, and I’m celebrating by reading Clear by Carys Davies.

I was planning to read a novel set in Wales, but I liked the look of Clear, and it’s by a Welsh author, so I’m overlooking the fact that it’s set on a remote Scottish island. In fact, I don’t think Davies has written a novel set in Wales yet—her debut, West, was about a settler searching for dinosaur bones in the American West, and her second, The Mission House, was set in south India.

Her third novel, Clear, is about the intersection of two very different lives: Ivar is the last inhabitant of a small island halfway between Scotland and Norway, and John Ferguson is the impoverished church minister who’s been sent to evict him.

As this brief description suggests, Carys Davies takes the opportunity to cover a couple of interesting historical events in Clear. The first is the Highland Clearances, in which landowners evicted poor tenants from their land across the Highlands and islands of Scotland and replaced them with more profitable sheep farms. The second is the founding of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843, as a breakaway from the established Church of Scotland.

It’s these two events that bring the men together on the remote, unnamed island. John Ferguson follows his principles to join the Free Church, but he’s left without an income and without funds to set up and maintain his church. So he takes on an assignment for a landowner: just set aside one month to travel to the island, evict Ivar, conduct a survey to help the landowner plan his sheep farm, and he’ll travel back home with enough money to support him and his wife Mary and to establish his church.

Of course, this being a novel, things don’t go to plan. Soon after his arrival, John slips on a wet clifftop path and plunges into the sea. Ivar discovers his leather bag floating in the sea first, before coming across his half-dead body on a nearby beach. He nurses him back to health in his tiny cottage, and when John finally regains consciousness, he doesn’t have the heart to tell him that he’s come to evict him from the only home he’s ever known.

Another complication is that John and Ivar do not share a language in common. John speaks English and, to a lesser extent, Scots, but Ivar speaks only the language of his island. John had brought with him a script written by someone with knowledge of a related Shetlandic language, explaining to Ivar the nature of his mission, but it was lost to the sea.

So begins the slow process of finding a common language by pointing to objects and noting down the words that Ivar uses for them. But languages don’t always have neatly corresponding words—they reflect the preoccupations of their users. So Ivar’s language has multiple words for different kinds of fog, different kinds of muddy bog, and John can’t tell them apart. Sometimes, too, the words allow Ivar to achieve much deeper levels of emotional expression:

If he’d been asked to describe his feelings he might have reached for that word in his language that described what happens when a rock is covered and uncovered by the sea—when, briefly, the water rises up and submerges it completely before it falls away again and reveals it. It was how Ivar felt when the wave of emotion crashed over him.

Ivar’s dying language plays a large role in the novel, the mutual lack of comprehension acting both as a barrier and a facilitator of communication. It blocks John from conducting his business and forces him to communicate with Ivar on a deeper level, to see him as a human being instead of as an object to be removed.

The language also reinforces the brutality of what’s being done to Ivar. When we hear of tenant farmers being evicted, it’s easy to think of them as temporary residents whose lease has ended. But Ivar’s people have been on this island long enough to develop an ancient and complex language that bears almost no relationship to Scottish and little relationship even to the languages of other nearby islands. That can only happen over the course of centuries. His eviction will destroy not just his life, but an entire culture.

As they spend more time together, slowly finding ways to communicate and understand each other, John and Ivar develop a deep and close human connection. But lying in a nearby house is the gun and box of supplies that John brought from the hated landowner, and meanwhile the end of the month is drawing nearer and bringing the next ship with a man who will expect to take Ivar away to the mainland. And John’s wife Mary, who has discovered the real danger of John’s mission, is on her way to the island to rescue him. I won’t spoil it for you in case you plan to read the book, but it builds to quite a dramatic conclusion. There was a surprising twist towards the end too, which I found very beautiful.

Overall, this was a moving and beautifully told story of an unlikely bond between two very different people on opposing sides of a historic struggle. The characters are beautifully drawn, and the plot unfolds at just the right pace. I felt drawn to Ivar but also sorry for John and fascinated to see how his moral conflict would play out. I was even rooting for Mary, who is more of a supporting character in the tale. And when you add beautiful descriptions of nature and of Ivar’s dying language, the result is a memorable and highly accomplished novel.

Reading Wales Month lasts until the end of March, so there’s still plenty of time to read something and take part. I can definitely recommend Clear, but of course there are plenty of other good options too—you can find some ideas on Booker Talk.

Are you participating in Reading Wales Month this year? Have you read Clear or any of Carys Davies’s other novels? If not, do you think you’d like to based on this review? Let me know in the comments!