The Western Wind

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In Greek mythology, Zephyrus was the personification of the west wind and the bringer of light spring and early summer breezes; his Roman equivalent was Favonius (hence the adjective favonian, pertaining to the west wind). Although The Western Wind is set in late fifteenth-century Somerset, Harvey isn’t a habitué of historical fiction. For example, in The Other Boleyn Girl starring Scarlett Johnson, released in 2008, and South Riding, a 2011 mini-series.

Folk duo Maddy Prior and Tim Hart, who were an integral part of Steeleye Span, included the song to a different tune in two-part harmony on their 1971 duo album, Summer Solstice. Events are precisely dated; it is February 1491, but there seems no reason why it should be 1491 rather than 1391 or 1291.Harvey has in the past been a dab hand with an unreliable narrator and the sly structure of Reve’s account, which starts four days after Newman’s death before moving backwards, gives his actions layers of significance that it takes time to excavate. Harvey succeeds in making the imaginative leap from our own secular age to one in which there is widespread certainty that this life is no more than a prelude to eternity, and a testing-ground for men and women. The chief character of the book is the parish priest of the hapless village of Oakham, about to be swallowed up for its pasture lands by a hungry monastery nearby.

Harvey specialises in the unravelling both of mental states and narratives, so it’s appropriate perhaps that her fourth, The Western Wind, is a medieval detective story. The truly extraordinary thing about this novel is the way Harvey re-creates the mindset and beliefs of the medieval world, and makes the concerns of 500 years ago vivid and immediate. Perhaps the missing verses would have told us, or perhaps other verses were always yet to be written. Samantha Harvey’s novel is a deftly drawn reminder of our deeply human desire for connection and the risk involved in the revelation of that desire. Reve laments that the dean is “too intent on saving us wholly to care for the fate of any one of us singly” (p.John Reve, spiritual advisor to the residents of the hardscrabble English village of Oakham, relates the story in reverse chronology over four days before Lent. The British band Current 93 recorded an extended and modified version of the song sometime between 1982 and 1995, adding various new lines.