Carys Davies is the author of two collections of short stories, Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike, and two novels: West, which was the winner of the Wales Book of the Year for Fiction, and The Mission House, which was the Sunday Times (London) 2020 Novel of the Year. Born in Wales, Davies lived and worked for 12 years in New York and Chicago, and now lives in Edinburgh. Clear (Scribner, April 2, 2024) is her third novel--the atmospheric and captivating story of three characters whose lives are brought together, and forever changed, by the turbulent Scottish Clearances in the 1800s.
Clear tells a captivating story, and the ending is unexpected and memorable. Do you have a conclusion in mind when you first start writing, or does it develop organically?
I'd never be interested in writing a story if I knew the ending, or even the middle--I don't plan at all, but once I've arrived at some kind of tense and difficult situation, I can begin. My first novel, West, for example, starts with an English settler in early 19th-century Pennsylvania who leaves his home and young daughter because he believes woolly mammoths might still be alive in the wilderness beyond the Mississippi. All I knew when I began that novel was that here was a man who was looking for something he could never find.
In Clear I knew that John had arrived to evict Ivar, and that the situation was dangerous, but I had no idea how things would play out.
The three main characters are all complex and nuanced. Whose voices, and what scenes, were the most challenging to write?
I loved inhabiting all three, and their individual voices arrived very distinctly. John's voice was the hardest, as I think it would be for any modern, secular writer trying to capture the deep religiosity of someone across a distance of nearly 200 years.
By far the biggest challenge, though, was building a relationship between the two men--Ivar, the lone inhabitant of this remote island, and John, my impoverished minister sent to evict him--because they don't share a common language. The pace at which they come to communicate with each other had to be believable, and it took a lot of trial and error to get that right. But so often what's most challenging becomes the very heart of what you're doing: even as they were learning to talk to each other, it became clear that a lot of the tension and drama in the story would come from the silences between them and the gaps in their understanding.
The landscape and the language are vital, vivid, and dynamic parts of the story. Do you travel to visit the places you're writing about or find other ways to immerse yourself in the local environment and culture?
I've often written about places I've never visited, and even when I've written about places I know well, I don't re-visit them while I'm writing about them. Some kind of imaginative distance is vital. This was absolutely the case with Clear, though no other story has ever come to me the way Clear did.
Clear has its origins in a dictionary I stumbled across more than a decade ago in my local library in Edinburgh--thousands of extraordinary words in an extinct language: Norn, once spoken on the islands of Orkney and Shetland, which began to die out after the Danish king pawned the islands to Scotland in the middle of the 15th century. Somehow these words had the power to collapse both time and space, and although I'd been to Orkney and had a sense of the landscape, I didn't go back there. Instead, I sat at my desk and began to write a story "up and out" of the words themselves until I could see it all--the island, Ivar going about his days, John's arrival--like a film.
The story is set in the final years of the Scottish Clearances. What sources did you use to bring that era to life?
I live in Edinburgh, within striking distance of the Highlands, where you can walk today and still come across the rubble of homes that were pulled down when the tenants were evicted by the big landowners to make way for sheep. So, in that sense, the Clearances are all around us, centuries after they took place. Secondary sources like Tom Devine's The Scottish Nation were useful for learning more about what happened during the Clearances, and their historical context, and I read a lot of books about sheep, boats, and migrating birds. But, on the whole, when I'm writing about another time, I prefer to poke about in the archives to see what primary sources I can find--in this case, letters written by landowners and the managers of their estates and by church ministers; also inventories, financial accounts, court records, that sort of thing.
The tiny golden bird found by Ivar's grandmother was inspired by one of the hundred or so Viking objects unearthed a decade or so ago in south-west Scotland--the so-called Galloway Hoard. I saw the little bird once, gleaming in the pitch-blackness of a display case at an exhibition in Edinburgh, and never forgot it.
Clear is a touching portrait of loneliness and human connections. Did you write it through the Covid pandemic lockdown and, if so, how did those experiences and insights influence the story?
Lockdown was such an intense time for us all and it definitely magnified certain fears, and yes, I did write quite a lot of Clear during that strange time. Writing about the past is, for me, a way of worrying about the present--about love and death and solitude and family and home and personal demons and depression, along with things like religion and nationalism and dispossession. Most of those preoccupations are in my stories in one way or another.
This novel is set in solitude. Does that reflect your own favorite way to write and create?
Writing a novel is very solitary, it has to be, and that suits me very well. When I'm working, I'm either thinking or reading or writing, and I can only do that if I'm not being interrupted. I've always worked at the kitchen table in our flat because it has the stillest, quietest window onto our neighbourhood--no cars and no people, just buildings, trees, a piece of the sky and the occasional bird. My husband works at home, too, and he knows if he comes into the kitchen he's not supposed to hang about very long.
The Scottish Clearances were a fascinating period of history. Are there any other time periods or places you'd like to write about in the future?
Absolutely--but I don't think you can go looking for stories; I think they find you. So, you have to be patient, until some kind of chance encounter or serendipitous little piece of gold you stumble across turns a key into some other time or place and makes it possible for you to go there. --Grace Rajendran