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Summary
Summary
An extraordinary new novel by Samantha Harvey--whose books have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize), and the Guardian First Book Award-- The Western Wind is a riveting story of faith, guilt, and the freedom of confession.
It's 1491. In the small village of Oakham, its wealthiest and most industrious resident, Tom Newman, is swept away by the river during the early hours of Shrove Saturday. Was it murder, suicide, or an accident? Narrated from the perspective of local priest John Reve--patient shepherd to his wayward flock--a shadowy portrait of the community comes to light through its residents' tortured revelations. As some of their darkest secrets are revealed, the intrigue of the unexplained death ripples through the congregation. But will Reve, a man with secrets of his own, discover what happened to Newman? And what will happen if he can't?
Written with timeless eloquence, steeped in the spiritual traditions of the Middle Ages, and brimming with propulsive suspense, The Western Wind finds Samantha Harvey at the pinnacle of her outstanding novelistic power.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Harvey (Dear Thief) weaves a dazzling tapestry around loss and confession in late-15th-century England in this breathtaking novel. Thomas Newman, benevolent landlord and relative newcomer to the hamlet of Oakham, disappeared into the river on the Saturday before Ash Wednesday. Parish priest John Reve recounts the icy unnamed rural dean's condescending investigation into the death across four days in reverse order, beginning on Shrove Tuesday, the day Newman's shirt is found near the river. The dean urges Reve to report any information gleaned from the parish's pre-Lent confessions to determine if Newman was killed, slipped, or committed suicide. During his investigation, Reve hears about the mundane mistakes, distressing habits, and intentionally aggressive mutterings from a number of possible suspects. There's Lord Townshend, the landowner who has reluctantly sold holdings to Newman to pursue his quixotic cheese-making endeavors; Herry Carter, who thought of Newman as a father but is behaving as if he needs to atone; Sarah Spenser, who keeps confessing to the murder but may be seeking the relief of death from her wasting disease; and other shady types with suspicious reactions. Amid his attempts to deflect the dean's intrusions and comfort his flock, Reve mourns his sister's recent departure and recalls Newman's friendly jabs against priestly intercession in favor of personal piety. Harvey's final chapter unspools the truth of Newman's death and Reve's own surprising secrets. The lush period details and acute psychological insight will thrill fans of literary mysteries and historical fiction. This is an utterly engrossing novel. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The events of four days, detailed in reverse and through the eyes of a parish priest, John Reve, tell the story of a drowning death in the Somerset, England, village of Oakham in 1491. The death of the village's richest citizen, a man named Newman, who may have committed suicide or been murdered, frames Reve's crisis of faith, which, in turn, colors the very landscape and shapes his judgment, corporeal and, perhaps, eternal. Oakham is an isolated village, cut off from others by its failed bridge and constantly plagued by dreadful weather, flooding, illness, and death. Its denizens are gray, in dress and spirit, and, as Reve hears their paltry confessions, he tasks them with atonement and asks them (and himself) to work their way back to God's grace. The county dean arrives after Newman's drowning, requiring answers that Reve is loath to give honestly a necessary deception. Harvey evokes the darkness of both winter and spirit with stark yet lovely imagery: I didn't know how the trees kept their enthusiasm for growing. Reve's meditations on purgatory, illness as punishment, priestly intervention, God in nature, and the nature of sin are mirrored in the story as the characters grapple with the grief of loss and the frustration of ambiguity. Like Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow (1996) and Morris West's The Last Confession (2001), this compulsively readable portrait of doubt and faith reveals, in small lives, humanity's biggest questions.--Jen Baker Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN THE CLASSROOM, I sometimes find myself talking to my students about the differences between "reading for pleasure" and "reading like a writer." For decades, I tell them, I've been unable to read any piece of fiction truly for pleasure. But lately I find myself struggling not just with my inability to not read like a writer, but now also to not read like the liberal American writer that I am. I say all this because it is through a very particular lens - liberal, American, not to mention atheistic - that I read and utterly enjoyed Samantha Harvey's latest novel, "The Western Wind." Harvey is an English author, and "The Western Wind" is concerned (among other things) with man's relationship to God. I can't speak to Harvey's religious or political leanings, nor do I need or want to. But I have plenty to say about her beautifully rendered, deeply affecting, thoroughly thoughtful and surprisingly prescient fourth book, which takes place during the four holy days leading up to Ash Wednesday. Set in the village of Oakham in 1491, the story is narrated by the local priest, John Reve. If other places in England at the time felt more fully emerged from the Middle Ages (commonly agreed to have ended in 1485 with the crowning of Henry Tudor), the village of Oakham is, at best, still a few years behind the promised enlightenment of the Renaissance. (We are treated to vivid time-transporting descriptions of everything from cooking and eating a whole goose to celebrating a damp wedding in a barn to fornicating while unwashed in a forest with a mule for a witness.) The narrative begins with the news that the village's wealthiest man, Thomas Newman, has drowned in the river. The means of his death - suicide, murder, accident - are unknown, and this mystery adds to the uneasiness of the villagers as they prepare "to go indoors and put out their fires and grit their teeth for 40 days of Lent." In so many ways, this summary might suggest that this is a novel whose contents and relevance to our world are next to nonexistent. On the contrary, this medieval whodunit miraculously captures the otherworldly, fishout-of-water, discombobulating experience of being a liberal American today. Let me explain. Adding to the general fear and mistrust is the arrival of the suspicious regional dean, who travels to Oakham to "investigate" Newman's death and to help urge a confession. (For those unfamiliar, a dean is typically ranked above a priest and below an archdeacon, but in Harvey's story, "We've no bishop, no archdeacon, not for now, and he finds himself, bewilderingly, at the top of the heap.") The dean plays the part of detective, nemesis and unwanted supervisor, and his presence riles the townspeople and unsettles the priest. It is this very dynamic - allpowerful know-it-all vs. frustrated citizenry - that feels unfortunately - and dare I say deliberately? - most familiar to this reader. The dean takes up residence in the dead man's house and from there, "he watched us.... He said he'd protect us all. But he's a weak man, and weak men go for easy power; he saw a flock in grief and turmoil, and decided to prod it into the pen. Maybe he liked the sport of it, of catching us offguard, and suddenly there he was gently, solicitously proffering notions of murder so that he could find and hang the murderer, thus fulfilling the cycle of sin and recompense that gives order to this cryptic world and would show him to be in control of his parishes. He feared the ship would sink. I don't blame him for that; it's the fear of anybody who's found himself, mistakenly, at the helm. At several helms at once, and he not a captain. I dare to add, not even a sailor." The four holy days that account for the time span of "The Western Wind" - which are recounted in reverse order - feel nothing short of unholy to both the reader and the narrator, John Reve. As Shrove Tuesday comes to an end, with Newman already four days dead and the story only just getting started, the priest exits his church, around which the whole village has formed a ring, their yearly custom. Drunk and in masks made of animal skin and with husbands dressed as wives, the villagers swarm the priest: "A shifting shape running toward me with a large head of a pig.... My shoulders were clasped, my head gripped by blind fingers and a mask placed over it whose weight jarred my head forward. I knew it was a mask by its stench of animal-gut and mud and the slenderest sweetness of grass - the pig's head, the hare, a unicorn, an owl? It was heavy enough to be the head of a real bear.... Blind inside my own disguise, baffled and frantic. They were chanting my name as if they wanted me to do something, but I couldn't act - we behave according to the creatures we are, and I had no notion of what creature they'd made me become." Harvey's is a story of suspense, yes. It is a story of a community crowded with shadows and secrets. But to read this novel is to experience a kind of catharsis. In John Reve, a 15th-century priest at war with his instincts and inclinations and at times even with his own flock, we find a kind of Everyman, and Harvey delivers a singular character at once completely unfamiliar and wholly universal. We tire treated to vivid, time-transporting descriptions of life in 1491. HANNAH pittard'S most recent novel, "Visible Empire," was published in June.
Guardian Review
From Danny the Champion of the World to serving Cinzano in the living-room bar ... fictional dreamscapes and memories merge as the author recalls her childhood I was made in Maidstone. That isn't a sentence I've said or written before, because I never think about where I am from or consider myself to have roots. I left when I was about 11, following my parents' divorce, and after that we moved every two years or so, from one rented place to another. Then my mum moved to Ireland and I to York, then Sheffield, then Japan, and on it went, hop-scotching around for the next two decades. So my idea of home is an ungrounded, unsteady one, though, for the first decade of my life I couldn't have been more rooted; I lived in the same house, in a village (a generous word for a more or less centreless housing estate) called Ditton, a couple of miles from Maidstone. Our streets had bucolic names such as Woodlands Road, Acorn Grove, Walnut Drive. My dad was a builder and there was hardly a house in the area that didn't have a drive or a porch or a garage made by him. Our own three-bed semi was state-of-the-art early 80s kitsch: we had a bar and a dartboard in our living room; my dad clad the ceiling with fake beams and put up brasses. There was a pool table in the kitchen. Neighbours came round often and my sister and I stood behind the bar and served them cans of Shepherd Neame beer or Babycham or Cinzano with glacé cherries. We played in the woods or we played cricket at the rec or we drew out chalk territories between streets then spent our weekends defending our borders from infiltration by the kids at Cedar Close. In my memory, all I ever did was play - play and read. I used to fall into books and find it hard to get out, and the books I read formed part of the dreamscape that is childhood. Reality, imagination and dream lived on a fluid continuum for me, from the ordinary - the feel of the hot metal neck of the lamppost we used as "home" in our games of tag on summer evenings - to the fantastical. I saw the Worst Witch fly past the bathroom window one night. In our woods I saw the sleeping-pill-infused raisins dropped by Danny the Champion of the World. It was a good childhood - free, secure, happy. Why, then, when I go back, do I feel almost an aversion? It was a good childhood - free, secure, happy. Why, then, when I go back (my dad still lives there, in the same house - bar, beams and dartboard gone), do I feel almost an aversion? I suppose when there is a sudden rupture in a life - in my case my parents separating - it's the rupture that's remembered, and not the thing that's ruptured. Whenever I've gone back I've felt suffocated and as if I need to get away. As an adult I was always frustrated by how much nothing changed, how everyone stayed where they were, with their begonia borders and cats and tabloid newspapers, how they withdrew, got older, then died. But I can see that part of my dislike of the place is in its association with loss, forgetting that to feel loss, there must have been something worth losing. I am only just beginning to appreciate how much of myself was made there and how much trust the place gave me in the world to go out and do the very things that would separate me from where I began. I remember a leaving card my class made me when I moved away age eleven, a huge card. One of my friends, Oliver, had written: "Alas you are gone." Writing this now, I can feel some of that sentiment: alas, I am gone. But it isn't. It's still remarkably the same, inevitably with more cars, more houses. My dad has built a few more extensions and repaved some drives. Otherwise it exists timeless and contradictory. On one hand there's the mundane working-class dignity of the squirrel door-knockers and uPVC windows. On the other there's the mysticism of childhood where dreams, books, imaginings and memories have run together. Seen one way, a humdrum housing estate. Seen another, entrance to a lost world.
Kirkus Review
An imposing medieval mystery about a fearful religious community in the grips of secrecy.In her fourth novel, Harvey (Dear Thief, 2014, etc.) has meticulously fashioned a historical mystery set in Oakham, a small, damp village in southwestern England, isolated by a river and buffeted by chilly winds. Its economy is weak, its villagers "scrags and outcasts." It's the year 1491. Wealthy, beneficent landowner Thomas Newman has talked about building a bridge. On Shrove Saturday eve he drowns in the river; the body is missing. Accident? Murder? Suicide? The dean of the local church, a man who had "a nose for the nasty," has instructed John Reve, a burdened young priest and our narrator, to solve the mystery quickly and punish the guilty. Is Reve reliable? Did he kill Newman? Reve laments that in "desperate times people do desperate things: they steal, they lie, they cheat, they despair, they forsake Mass." But this is no British cozy. Harvey has subtly crafted a complex narrative by adding another twistthe story goes backward. Reve's narration takes place over the "four days of Shrovetide before Lent," beginning on Tuesday, Feb. 17, and ending on Saturday the 14th, the night Newman died. Reve, as jury, will collect the evidence and, as judge, identify the killer. His court is his "little dark box," the "crude and childish" confessional. The villagers come to confess their sins, some even pleading, "I killed Newman." Reve listens, dissuades, and blesses"Benedicite, Dominus, Confiteor"with a "hefty pardon," performing his "endless, thankless job, this one of serving God." Harvey provides a wide array of intriguing, mostly pitiful suspects, each bearing some guilt, who live, Reve says, "in wariness at the whims and punishments of God." The story is told in pensive, faux medieval prose, with chapter titles that suggestively repeat back and forth as the overall narrative inexorably, circuitously unwinds from present to past.A dazzling, challenging read but one worth taking on. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Told in quietly arresting prose, this new book from award-winning British author Harvey (Dear Thief) is set in 1491 Oakham, a not terribly prosperous village now bone-sodden after a particularly dreary winter. As the work opens, Thomas Newman, Oakham's wealthiest man, has been lost to the swollen river on Shrove Saturday, whether by his hand, by another's, or by accident no one knows. Conscientious pastor John Reve tries to comfort his flock while holding off the preening, sanctimonious dean, who is eager to find fault with John's ministry and convict someone for Thomas's murder. The story unfolds backward in time from Shrove Tuesday to the day of Thomas's death, with John hearing confession from his carefully sketched -parishioners, pondering his friendship with the deceased (they argued intriguingly about theology), and recalling his own family, including a sister just lost to him through marriage. As the narrative moves to a superbly conceived ending, Thomas emerges as a good but grieving man, and it soon becomes clear that John understands more of what happened than he lets on. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers of literary and -historical fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 5/21/18.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
