Clear

Ivar is the secondary protagonist of Clear who also serves as one of John’s romantic interests. He is described as having “hair…the color of dirty straw, his beard darker, browner, full and perhaps unclean, with a patch of gray over his jaw on the left-hand side that stood out from the rest like a child’s handprint” (4). Ivar lives on an island north of Scotland, on the way to Trondheim, Norway.

Ivar’s family used to live on the island with him, and they were forced to work tirelessly to survive and pay rent to the Lowrie estate that was relentlessly collected by Strachan. Ivar has a strong distaste for the Lowries and Strachan due to their cruelty to the residents of the island and Ivar’s family. Ivar’s father and nephew died in the same week, then later his brothers drowned in a boating accident. Finally, Ivar’s mother, his sister Jenny, and his grandmother left for Canada, but Ivar remained behind, unwilling to leave the island. Nearly 20 years into his solitude, Ivar thinks himself content until John and Mary break his isolation.

Ivar first becomes attached to Mary’s calotype that he finds in John’s satchel, keeping the image with him constantly and admiring it frequently. However, once he finds John and John wakes up and begins to recover, Ivar’s affection transitions from the image of Mary to the live personhood of John, though he’s uncertain how or when, thinking, “He could never say if it happened little by little in the course of those first few days while his unexpected visitor drifted in and out of sleep, or when he found himself, one evening, reaching for the stranger’s battered black coat, wanting to repair it” (67). Objects are important to the transition of Ivar’s affection. His sentiments transfer from Mary’s picture to John’s coat, demonstrating how his attachment to the idea of Mary wanes in comparison to his attachment to the physical manifestation of John’s presence.

John breaking Ivar’s solitude changes Ivar fundamentally, as he no longer exists solely in the context of himself and the island around him. Ivar even comes to realize that he previously lacked true discernment about his circumstances, thinking, “It was as if he’d never fully understood his solitude until now” (95). Ivar didn’t fully comprehend the depth of his isolation, physically and emotionally, until John’s arrival. John brings him back into human connection, allowing him to realize who he can become through the lens of relationships with others. Instead of being a man alone on an island, he can be countless other things through forging connections with other people. The bigendered language Davies uses to describe Ivar—“he had been turned into something he’d never been or hadn’t been for a long time: part brother and part sister, part son and part daughter, part mother and part father, part husband and part wife” (95)—further illustrates the wide breadth of the possibilities for his life now that John is in it.

Mary Ferguson is the tertiary protagonist of Clear and John’s other love interest and wife. She is described as having dark hair and a shy expression that comes from her attempts to hide her false teeth. Mary met John when she was 43, and they quickly fell in love. Mary thinks of her and John’s relationship as a refuge from the rest of the world. Even amidst the Great Disruption, John and Mary remain steadfast in their commitment to each other, and Mary thinks it’s “as if, in the midst of all the ecclesiastical drama of the past few years, they had […] managed to live in the eye of it, at some sort of slower center of it all, on a different planet of their own” (72). No matter what happens in the world around their relationship, John and Mary keep each other grounded. As John’s job takes him to the furthest reaches of the Scottish isles, their marriage keeps them steady.

Their marriage is also a transformative experience for both John and Mary. Mary often compartmentalizes her life, and she knows that John does the same, that there’s “a Before Comrie and an After Comrie; that their lives were divided into two parts, the part before they met and the part since” (106). Comrie refers to the earthquake in which Mary lost her false teeth and John recovered them for her, becoming the inciting event in their relationship. Their lives were separate entities until their marriage, which has turned them into new people within the context of their emotional and romantic bond. However, Mary continues to compartmentalize her life even after the marriage, especially once she recognizes the bond between John and Ivar when she arrives on the island. When she reflects on her existence, she thinks, “Her life seemed to be separating itself into three different parts […] she wondered if what she was looking at now was the fourth and final part” (180-81). Her relationship with John is an important part of her life, but this relationship is changing with the addition of Ivar to John’s life. Mary is remarkably understanding of John and Ivar’s bond, as she understands what it means to love John and create a life with him.

The fourth part of Mary’s life is open-ended, as her life with both John and Ivar could take many different forms. Regardless of what the future holds, the fourth part of her life will continue to feature her relationship with John and offer her the chance to forge a new relationship with Ivar.