Reading time: About 2 minutes
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of images from Carys Davies….
Carys Davies is a British novelist and short story writer. She studied modern languages at Oxford, and worked as a freelance journalist in New York and Chicago before moving to Lancaster, Lancashire. She currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Davies published her third novel, Clear, in 2024. Set at the time of the Highland Clearances, it tells the story of a minister sent to a remote Scottish island to evict its last inhabitant. In 2024, it won the Bookmark Festival Book of the Year and was shortlisted for Scotland’s National Book Awards Scottish Fiction Book of the Year and the Historical Writers’ Association Gold Crown Award.
I finished the book in an afternoon, mightily impressed by Davies’s superb use of figurative language. Here are my favourite examples:
- His hair was 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.
- As the waves gathered toward the shore they resembled veins raised beneath the skin of the sea, moving in a shifting line that altered and broke like a line of geese heading north, but they brought nothing with them.
- The tobacco was old now and stale, with no more flavor than if he’d stuffed his pipe with a bit of ground-up sheepskin, but still, he liked the feeling of the smoke being pulled down inside his body and then watching it leave him in a rough torrent that collapsed into a flattened, stringy cloud, like a skein of yarn that slowly disintegrated and became absorbed into the atmosphere around him.
- Blue gray and still, it [the face] had a sharp nose and dark eyebrows that were higher at the sides than where they met in the middle — like a bird, flying.
- It was so long since anyone but Strachan had looked at him properly, and if he’d been asked to describe his feelings, he might have reached for that word in his language that described what happens when a rock is covered and uncovered by the sea — when, briefly, the water rises up and submerges it completely before it falls away again and reveals it.
- Last winter, when he’d been ill, he’d thought about his own death, and what it would be like for there to be no one to wash him as his mother and his grandmother had washed the skin-and-bone bodies of his father and Jenny’s little boy, and wrap him as they’d wrapped them in a knitted shawl and lower him into a hole in the island’s cool familiar earth and cover him over with a quilt of soil and stones.
- At night he’d lain awake wondering if he might be able to slip out without Ivar noticing, but he wasn’t at all confident that Ivar ever really went to sleep — even when his eyes were closed and his breathing was steady and quiet, there was a quality of lightness about his sleep that seemed, to John Ferguson, as breakable as glass.
- There were days when the mist fell like a cloak onto the island’s shoulder; when rain fell in big, coarse drops, melting the soil into a soft brown soup; when a cold, light wind blew low over the ground, making the bogs shiver.
