"lesbians?"

"2.5 stars
*This review is a postcard from Outlier Island* 🌴📨📫

short review for busy readers: nature, nature, nature, nature, religion, marriage, nature, nature, Highland Clearances, religion, nature, nature, language, language, nature, language, religion, language, nature, nature, nature, nature, language, nature, feelings, The End sort of.

in detail:
I don't think Carys Davies is for me. This is the 2nd of her works that I've read and found both highly problematic technically and tedious/huh? as far as storyline goes.

That she's a talented writer is obvious, but as I disagree with almost all of her authorial choices, that talent feels largely squandered to me. And if I were in a devilish mood, I'd accuse her of Grievous Authorial Cowardice on three major counts in this novel.

1. When John has his accident at the beginning of the story, the POV suddenly switches from semi-close 3rd, to omniscient, breaking the 4th wall, before going back into 3rd. Why? Why the sudden pan out at a crucial point in the narrative? Why the sudden shift to an impersonal POV when an up close view would have been far more impactful on the plot?

2. If we are to assume (view spoiler)[ homoerotic feelings and homosexual sex between John and Ivar (hide spoiler)] then why is it only alluded to in highly vague, "if you've been there, you'll know" fuzzy camera focus type of way? Why the coyness?

3. The ending is a non-ending. The conflict is not resolved, nor even faced. It's skirted around, it's looked at...and then bolted away from (view spoiler)[ with Mary swooping in at the end to provide a conflict-free deus-ex-machina historically problematic ending. (hide spoiler)]. The author simply abandons the narrative, walks away, leaving the story problem entirely unresolved. (Bad, bad form.)

All of this points strongly to a general discomfort and avoidance of dealing directly with the plot conflict, of getting really stuck into the topics touched upon.

The politics of the Free Church, the actual horror of the Scottish Clearances, John's innate hypocrisy in so easily taking a job from Lowrie and much more are viewed from a comfy "tea and bird-watching" distance.

Instead of meeting the story full on, we are given characters pondering inconsequential minutia that effectively blinkers out any of these larger conflicts, while being showered with pages and pages of descriptions of nature.

Great descriptions, but they make up the bulk of this novel and I'm not someone who gets chills of delight by reading lists of plants and wildlife or having grass and hills described to me umpteen times while nothing much else happens.

The idea for "Clear" is not bad, neither are the characters nor the plot conflict. But the reticence of Davies to actually engage with her narrative makes the novel into a tedious exercise in nature observation and very little else.

An average 2.5 stars."