'Isn’t there always a bright, willing part of us that keeps hoping that what we know isn’t true?' - Samantha Harvey
This review contains mild spoilers which do not affect the plot. I received a free reading copy of this book through Waterstones.
When Samantha Harvey's new paperback was chosen as Waterstones Book of the Month for March 2019, I was pretty excited, because historical fiction doesn't often make the cut. From the blurb I gathered it was a medieval setting, with an unsolved drowning, and a priest puzzling out the mystery. It sounded like a Cadfael story, or one of CJ Sansom's wonderful Shardlake mysteries, and I was very keen to get my teeth into a nice historical crime drama.
I quickly discovered that I had vastly, vastly underestimated this novel. Don't get me wrong - I would have eagerly lapped up a bit of familiar historical crime. I am definitely a 'cosy crime' reader and can't get enough of twisty murder plots set in bygone times. But this is no simple whodunnit.
The novel opens with priest John Reve being woken by a parishioner who has, it seems, discovered the body of their friend Thomas Newman. Newman was the wealthiest man in the town, and has been missing for several days, presumed drowned in the river. The body, however, has disappeared by the time Reve and his companion arrive back at the water's edge.
Everything about this novel exists in a liminal state, but especially the opening: the riverbank is neither town nor wilderness, and at the cusp of dawn and the start of the new season of Lent, time is somehow suspended, with John Reve and his uncertainty at the centre of everything. The supposed moral guardian of his flock, Reve is desperately unsure of what has happened to Newman and through that doubt we begin to see doubts forming in regard to his faith and vocation.
The Western Wind pivots on Reve's perception of how humanity relates to the natural world, and to God, concerns which govern every aspect of life in his 15th-century town. His throwaway musing to Newman, many months ago, as to why time might move forwards but not backwards, is woven into the fabric of the novel: as the day of the 'discovery' fades, we are transported not to the next morning, but the previous one, and so on until we reach the fatal day of Newman's disappearance.
What we learn about the town during this slide backwards in time is a kaleidoscopic web of relationships, associations, secrets, and motives, revealed in careful fragments through the townspeople's confessions to the enigmatic Reve. What we believe to be the case on day four shifts entirely by the time we witness the events of day three. Reve's shrewd observations are surprisingly funny, his tone laconic and resigned, but the reader can't shake a sense of foreboding as time winds in the wrong direction.
The novel is full of the kind of small, visceral detail that makes one suspect that Harvey herself might be some kind of time traveller, evoking the full medieval force of bodily functions, animal stenches, and sickening maladies (a particular favourite was the lengthy scene in which John forces himself to consume an entire goose in one sitting - for reasons unclear until later, or rather, earlier). The town becomes familiar, the encircling river and its doomed bridge providing a constant, palpable claustrophobia.
To conclude, this is a strange and genre-defying book which I would recommend no matter which of its many faces - historical fiction, crime drama, modernist experiment with time - most appeals. With intimate historical details that seem lifted from real life, a mystery which keeps the reader on tenterhooks, and the threatening atmosphere created by its backwards narrative, there is so much to admire.
I think I have waxed lyrical enough about this fascinating book, so all that remains is to give it a score...
My rating: 5 stars!