Clear
It is 1843, and John Ferguson, an impoverished minister of the newly established Free Church of Scotland, is forced to take any work he can find. He is sent to a remote Scottish island to evict its last remaining tenant so that the land can be used for grazing sheep. His mission is hampered by an accident soon after his arrival and by the fact that he has no common language with Ivar, the hermit-like tenant.
Yet the two men start to form a bond, prompted by a shared awareness of the natural environment. Meanwhile on the mainland, John’s wife Mary, starved of news about her husband, and worried about the morality of his mission, decides to take matters into her own hands.
On the surface Clear is a story about the cruelty of the Highland Clearances. This was a time when Scottish landowners forgot about their clan loyalties and sought to maximise profits by evicting small tenant farmers, many of whose families had worked the same land for generations. But this short novel is about so much more. It is a lyrical exploration of the landscape, of loneliness, and of human relationships.
Some of the indirect observation comes from Mary, who notes that ‘it was in the nature of Churches to be constantly splintering, and dividing, and disagreeing about things, and starting again’. Through the interactions of the characters, we see that this applies equally to individual lives and to wider society. A perfectly crafted novel.
