If you are a fan of rambling family sagas which span detail-strewn decades, then Clear is not for you. At 160 pages, it’s a novella. The prose is sparse, perhaps often dry. None of your enthusiastic digressive chapters about the state of the nation here. A chapter can be half a page. This means that the diligent reader learns to enjoy the unexpected – “the naked man resembled an enormous jellyfish”, “the mist fell like a cloak on the island’s shoulders”.