Yes, I know that this author’s given name is a variant spelling of my given name, but that’s not why I’m putting her in the spotlight for this post! Her novels are short, punchy, imaginative, and . . . strange. Her main characters are loners in lonely places or loners who have embarked on problematic journeys. She can set the scene with a few deft sentences, conjuring up the most outlandish sites. Oh, and she’s garnered a number of literary prizes.
Davies’ first novel, West, was published in 2018.
The plot is preposterous, the characters are peculiar, and the language is spare. Yet this book made my post “Favorite Reads of 2018.” Here’s a slightly condensed reprint of my review from that year:
Davies spins a tale that’s akin to ancient myth, set on the North American continent in about 1815. This was an era when the lure of the western frontier was irresistible to some people living in the East. One of these people is Cy Bellman, a mule breeder in central Pennsylvania, who reads in a newspaper about the discovery in Kentucky of the bones of gigantic animals. Cy convinces himself that living exemplars of these animals still roam in the farthest reaches of the continent, driven west by settlement. Cy, who is a widower, leaves his young daughter, Bess, in the care of his unmarried sister and sets off to the west. He hopes to find some amazing creatures if he ventures a ways off the paths that Lewis and Clark traversed in their 1804-06 expedition through the Louisiana Purchase.
The narrative of West alternates between the experiences of Cy in the wilderness (perils: hunger, animal attack, Indian attack, winter) and the experiences of Bess in Pennsylvania (perils: predatory men, clueless aunt, lack of education). Davies builds tension artfully. She pauses in her rapid narrative sweep for descriptions at moments that capture the extremity of the threats to both Cy and Bess. Here is Cy at the end of his first winter on the road:
“One night he heard the ice booming and cracking in the river, and in the morning bright jewels of melting snow dripped from the feathery branches of the pines onto his cracked and blistered face, his blackened nose.” (21)
Despite the harsh conditions, Cy continues to be obsessed with getting a sighting of monstrous animals. But there’s also a general wanderlust at work. A central theme of European and American literature has always been the journey, the pilgrimage, the hero’s voyage. Cy’s trip is set against the dangers for stay-at-home Bess. And uniting these two stories is a third key character, who signs on as a guide for Cy: “An ill-favored, narrow-shouldered Shawnee boy who bore the unpromising name of Old Woman From A Distance.” (27)
I was hesitant to dip into this little novel because I was suspicious of a Brit writing about early America. Such foolish prejudice I displayed! Carys Davies has produced an amazing portrait of frontier life circa 1815, but that’s only the backdrop to her exploration of ambition, fear, lust, weariness, greed, and familial affection.
Davies’ next novel was The Mission House, in 2020.
The Mission House is set in contemporary India and features more of Davies’ unconventional characters: a disabled orphan, a barber who aspires to be a country-Western singer, and a depressive British librarian taking a rest-cure. The Briton, Hilary Byrd, takes up temporary residence with a missionary in a remote hill station and interacts with locals in the household and in the neighborhood. The modern independent India becomes blurred with the old India, under the former British imperialist rule. Hilary seeks to escape England and yet ends up in a place with many British trappings. Beneath the surface, politics seethe.
Davies’ most recent novel is Clear, which came out in 2024.
For this one, I recommend reading the Author’s Note at the end of the book before starting the fiction. Davies explains the “Clearances” of the 18th and 19th centuries in Scotland: “Whole communities of the rural poor were forcibly removed from their homes by landowners in a relentless program of coercive and systematic dispossession to make way for crops, cattle, and—increasingly as time went on—sheep.”
The novel is set in the year 1843, when the Clearances coincided with a major upheaval in the Presbyterian Church in Scotland. A middle-aged clergyman, John Ferguson, unemployed and desperate, takes a fee-for-service job: evicting a lone tenant from a (fictitious) remote Scottish island in the North Sea, as part of the Clearances. The tenant, Ivar, is an unlettered recluse who speaks only Norn, a Germanic language nearly extinct at the time. Soon after being dropped off by a ship passing by the island, John falls down a cliff and is seriously injured. Ivar finds John and cares for him while he recovers, and the two form an uneasy bond, as John struggles with his assignment to remove Ivar from the island.
Meanwhile, back in mainland Scotland, John’s wife, Mary, who was never too keen on his taking the job, gets more and more uneasy. As with Davies’ other two novels, Clear comes rushing to a startling conclusion.
All of Carys Davies’ novels are best read in one sitting, so set aside a few hours to be swept away.
