Clear

“He wished he could swim—the swimming belt felt like a flimsy thing and it had been no comfort to be told not to worry, the men couldn’t swim either.”

The opening lines of Clear establish John’s fear in his mission to evict Ivar. He is afraid from the moment he boards the Lily Rose to approach the island, and this fear lingers within him even as he grows closer in his relationship with Ivar. Davies also starts the novel in medias res, beginning in the middle of the action with John’s journey to the island instead of starting with an explanation of John’s intentions.

“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