Clear

“Walking along the bank between the two low waters in the lightly moving wind, he thought about that, the pleasure of it—sitting with Pegi and quietly knitting; Pegi very still, his hands barely moving as they worked the needles; the only other motion a cobweb quivering in the atmosphere near the ground.”

The stillness of Ivar’s island life demonstrates the importance of the setting to his character, introducing The Power of Place in Shaping Identity. Ivar finds joy in knitting beside his horse in isolation, showing Ivar’s supposed contentment with his isolated existence prior to John’s arrival on the island.

“The day was clear with only a low line of cloud over the horizon, and if you’d been up in the sky that morning above the island with the gannets and the guillemots, the puffins and the cormorants and the oystercatchers, 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.”

Davies occasionally switches from third-person narration to second-person narration, addressing the audience with the term “you.” This narrative decision decreases the authorial distance from Davies to the audience and works to make the novel more immersive. The listing of specific bird species reinforces the sense of place and The Power of Place in Shaping Identity.

“If he was irked by the new Free Church’s revolt against the right of landowners like himself to confer clerical livings on ministers of their choice (or, to put it another way, distribute favors according to their own wishes), he didn’t say so.”

Henry Lowrie’s perspective on the Free Church is not particularly relevant to his desire to evict the tenants on his land. He may be upset about the system of patronage losing its power, but he is more focused on making more money on his land by clearing the land for sheep. Lowrie’s cruelty towards his tenants creates the dilemma of Eviction and Moral Reckoning that John must face.

“He would have struggled to put his feelings into words, but it’s fair to say that in less than two short days the woman inside the frame had become precious to him, and he would have preferred it if the man had been dead.”

Language plays a crucial role throughout Clear. Ivar and John struggle to communicate with each other, but occasionally they struggle to articulate their own feelings. Ivar can’t explain why he’s attached to the calotype of Mary, but he knows that he is and that he resents the threat John poses to this attachment. His loneliness speaks to Language and Empathy as Bridges Across Isolation.

“She’d listened while the squat, red-faced factor told John that he would have no trouble; that there was no one left now on the island but the idiot son, the one who hadn’t drowned, and he—assuming he was still there—was as placid and obedient as an old heifer.”

Strachan’s perspective on Ivar demonstrates his discriminatory attitude towards the tenants that he evicts on Lowrie’s behalf. He insults Ivar’s intelligence and compares him to an animal, attempting to convince John that Ivar is sub-human and therefore it is not morally wrong to evict him.

“She also regretted calling him pompous, which at some point she’d done because she was so cross and frustrated, and the truth was that John was not pompous. He was the least overbearing, most sincere person she’d ever met.”

Mary and John get into an argument about John’s decision to evict Ivar, reflecting their conflicting feelings over Eviction and Moral Reckoning. Though Mary accuses him of being domineering and self-important, she regrets their argument and instead reflects on his good qualities, demonstrating both the nuanced reality of their relationship and her positive opinion of him.

“The only thing he felt sure of was the feeling that he was not surprised to see the big fair-haired man looming over him; that there was something important about him he was supposed to know, but whatever it was lay just beyond his grasp.”

Even when John suffers from temporary amnesia, he knows that Ivar is important to him. This implicit knowledge of Ivar’s importance foreshadows the importance of their bond in the novel’s progression.

“He hoped so, because he felt bereft without her, and the stiff, salt-stained bag looked, like his Gospels, as if it had been in the water, and he couldn’t get out of his mind a picture of her beautiful portrait rolling across the lumpy floor of the ocean among the weeds and the fishes, as if Mary herself were being tossed about and drowned.”

Mary’s calotype as a symbol of the desire for human connection is clear in John’s concern for the calotype’s whereabouts. He desires a connection to Mary even as he’s on the island away from her, and her absence makes him feel as if the real Mary has also disappeared.

“It made him dizzy, the thought of someone else’s eyes upon him.”

Ivar’s thoughts about John’s attention demonstrates the intensity with which he craves human connection. No one has looked at Ivar in years, and John’s companionship surprises Ivar with its power and intensity. Their growing closeness invokes Language and Empathy as Bridges Across Isolation.

“She seemed like a ghost now, like someone from a long time ago, or who was very far away, or dead, more remote than his mother and his grandmother and Jenny, who’d gone to Canada; more remote than Hanus or his other brothers who’d drowned before they were men.”

Ivar’s desire for Mary’s calotype fades as his relationship with John grows. Though Ivar once regarded the calotype as real, he now sees it as fake. The calotype as a symbol of human connection remains relevant, as Ivar now has a relationship with John and no longer has the unfulfilled desire for connection.

“For a long time Mary was certain she couldn’t be happier than if she’d been able to live the whole of the rest of her life with Alice, the two of them in a small house of their own, but when Alice was nineteen, she married and sailed with her new husband to Calcutta, where she died.”

Mary’s closeness with her childhood friend Alice could be interpreted as romantic or platonic, and the novel doesn’t clarify the nature of Mary’s desires for Alice. However, Davies quickly describes the entirety of Alice’s life in one sentence: She was friends with Mary, she married young, and she died young.

“As an antiquarian he wouldn’t need Flett’s speech or the Summons, and it wouldn’t matter that he had left the pistol in the Baillie house with his box; as an antiquarian he would be safe, and he could delay the delivery of his message until the Lily Rose returned to bring them both away, and in the meantime he would ask God to forgive him for his cowardice and his lies.”

John’s struggles to come up with an explanation for his presence on the island, and his decision to attempt to pretend to be an antiquarian, demonstrate his attempts to distance himself from the colonialist violence of the Lowrie estate, which is why he leaves the gun in the Baillie house. His desire for forgiveness also illustrates the continuing presence of John’s faith, reflecting The Moral Cost of Religious Obedience and the Courage of Personal Change.

“First the woman in the picture who had stirred his feelings so powerfully but whose reality had somehow faded since the arrival of the man.”

Ivar’s description of Mary’s calotype as fading in its reality in conjunction with the development of his relationship with John further illustrates the symbolic importance of the calotype. Ivar’s desire for human connection has been fulfilled, so the calotype is nearly meaningless to him.

“Perhaps anyone on the receiving end of so much lively enthusiasm would have begun to feel that they were in some way the object of it all, and surely Ivar could not be blamed for starting to think, at around this time, that John Ferguson might be beginning to return his feelings.”

Due to John’s happiness at Ivar’s presence, Ivar begins to suspect that John also has romantic feelings for him. At only halfway through the novel, Ivar already suspects that John’s feelings for him have grown, though they do not act upon their feelings in a physical manner for many more pages.

“Certain words delighted him utterly. The one that described the condition of a ball of wool, for example, when it had just been started; that described its innermost beginning when a fine thread of worsted was being wound. Liki. When the thing was at the very start of what it would become.”

John’s joy for language is linked to his love for Ivar. He delights in learning Ivar’s language because he also delights in Ivar’s company and the ability to communicate with him. Their growing linguistic connection speaks to Language and Empathy as Bridges Across Isolation.

“Which was, she realized, his way of saying that there was behavior he tolerated in her that he would never tolerate in himself, or urge upon his congregation; it was his way of saying that…she would always be an exception, and that was because he loved her, and couldn’t help himself.”

John’s staunch Presbyterian beliefs do not extend into his relationship with Mary, which demonstrates the depth of his love for her. John holds himself and his congregation to strict Presbyterian standards, but his love for Mary makes him lessen his standards, to give her grace that he would never give to himself. John’s nuanced approach to faith reflects The Moral Cost of Religious Obedience and the Courage of Personal Change.

“She’d never paid much attention to her own body until she married John, and she’d been astonished to discover that such pleasure had been hiding there for so long—astonished that it had been there all this time, yet it had taken her forty-three years to discover it.”

Mary has a sexual awakening after her marriage to John, demonstrating another transformative element of their marriage. Prior to their relationship, Mary knew herself well emotionally and mentally, but her sexual awakening allows her to grow to know herself bodily.

“This will blow over, he tried to tell himself, keeping his eyes on the hearth. John Ferguson will calm down and forgive me for hiding his wife from him, and when he’s ready, he’ll take out the blue cloth book and lay it across his lap and ask me to pass him his pencil, and we’ll set about the task of adding another column of words on a fresh page and everything will be the same as before.”

Ivar’s thoughts after his fight with John demonstrate the importance of Language and Empathy as Bridges Across Isolation in their relationship. When Ivar thinks about his bond with John, he thinks primarily about their project of adding to their dictionary together and learning to communicate better.

“Even when they were still some way off, she would see the island rising out of the waves from its hidden beaches. She would see the dark cliffs and the tricky waters beneath that were dotted with skerries, and if the sun was shining, she would also see a gleam of green.”

Mary’s first glimpse of the island is idealized and beautiful, an image of a green landscape dotted with beaches and beautiful wildlife. As she grows closer to the island, however, a mist settles onto the water, demonstrating the uncertainty of what she will find on the island and once more invoking The Power of Place in Shaping Identity, as she is not sure what the island holds for her or for John.

“He used to sit […] outside the Baillie house and clean the gun […] and sometimes he’d shot at birds […] and once he’d used it to strike Jenny on the side of her head because she didn’t want his hands on her and had made her feelings known by biting his face.”

Ivar’s description of Strachan’s use of the gun illustrates the gun’s symbolic connection to colonialist violence and Strachan’s sexist attitude and abuse. Strachan uses the gun to kill birds, enacting violence on the natural landscape, and he uses it to harm Jenny when she refuses his unwanted sexual advances, inflicting violence on the women of the island.

“Looking back, it was impossible to unpick how one thing had led to another, and what exactly he had chosen to see and not to see, and how it was that he’d been able to convince himself that John Ferguson, with his dark hair and his sharp nose and his serious, anxious demeanor, had come from nowhere and was going nowhere—that he was some aimless traveler who had nothing to do with anything or anyone; that he was just here. Looking back, there was only one thing that was completely clear to him, and that was that he had loved the time he had spent with John Ferguson.”

Davies’s use of the term “unpick” further illustrates the motif of weaving. Ivar cannot pick apart the threads of his relationship with John, demonstrating the depth of their empathetic and romantic bond. Ivar also uses the term “love” to describe how he feels about being with John for the first time, illustrating the intensity of his feelings for John.

“On every one of his annual visits the old Lowrie minister had reminded them that they had been put on this earth to suffer, not to enjoy themselves.”

Ivar’s view of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland offers a different perspective from John’s. Though John begins to question providence towards the end of the novel, Ivar clearly shows the downsides of the faith and how demoralizing the doctrine of providence can be. Their complicated religious feelings speak to The Moral Cost of Religious Obedience and the Courage of Personal Change.

“He had no plan. All that can be said is that preventing Strachan’s men from landing was the only act he could think of that would stop everything coming to an end, and he latched on to it with a kind of mad faith.”

At the start of Chapter 39, Davies uses the vague male pronoun “he” to describe the person cleaning the gun and preparing to fire it, adding a layer of mystery to the text. It’s unclear until after the gun is fired who shot at Mary, and this uncertainty raises the narrative tension.