... beautifully rendered, deeply affecting, thoroughly thoughtful and surprisingly prescient ... 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, fish-out-of-water, discombobulating experience of being a liberal American today ... 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 ... Harvey delivers a singular character at once completely unfamiliar and wholly universal.
Richly immersive ... Harvey delivers with the intelligence and sympathy you would expect from the author of The Wilderness ... Her prose is as rich as ever, her structures clever and efficient. The narrative is an indirect, cumulative revelation of something we half-guessed from the beginning, but which remains shadowy enough that we daren’t put the book down in case we’re proved right ... as densely packed as all of Harvey’s work: it’s a historical novel full of the liveliness and gristle of the period it depicts; an absorbing mystery with an unpredictable flurry of twists in its last few pages; a scarily nuanced examination of a long-term moral collapse; a beautifully conceived and entangled metaphor for Britain’s shifting relationships with Europe. But most of all it’s a deeply human novel of the grace to be found in people.
Another writer might have focused simply on this mystery, perfectly sound material as it is. Harvey, however, wants to dig deeper in her version of Life in a Medieval Village: its monotony, in a bored priest’s recounting of confessions; its superstitions, including the Lenten draping of a Christ figure with a shawl to keep him warm; its amusements, such as the not-so-private lovemaking ... By the time we find out how Tom Newman died, we’re less interested in a mystery solved and more intrigued by the fate of a long-gone place, a place that Harvey brings to life from its historical tomb.
... bleak and transporting ... What will likely divide opinion among readers is Ms. Harvey’s decision to tell the story in reverse chronological order, working backwards toward Newman’s death. The Western Wind contains the staple ingredients of traditional mysteries—a hidden will, illicit love affairs, an extremely unreliable narrator—but the trick changes the novel from a standard procedural to something more philosophical ... What the muddled timeline sacrifices in dramatic effect it gains in atmosphere. Ms. Harvey has summoned this remote world with writing of the highest quality, conjuring its pungencies and peculiarities ... The dialogue throughout is excellent, blessedly free of the 'thou's and 'thee's that often oppress novels set in the Middle Ages, yet still strange and uncanny, just slightly displaced from conversation as we experience it ... In this superb novel, time, like guilt, is a murky medium, at once advancing and circling back, and pulling humankind helplessly between its battling currents.
While Samantha Harvey’s fourth novel is on the surface a medieval whodunnit, it is also a fine character study, and a brilliantly convincing evocation of both time and place ... the experience her book engenders is less like reading a novel and more akin to time travel ... There is great pleasure to be had in those vertiginous moments when authentic, banal reality...seems briefly to make itself known to the imagination, and The Western Wind is almost uniquely satisfying in this regard ... I was left with unanswered questions, and a nagging sense of doubt...And yet the book’s flaws are far outweighed by the luminosity of the writing and the masterly evocation of a world so utterly different from the one we live in.
Mysterious, ominous ... beautifully works its way back to the start, sparking and flickering with the jealousies, affairs, conflicts and desires of the villagers, who are brilliantly described as they go about their days ... Harvey’s prose is luminous, a wonderfully lyrical look at the way religious belief and pragmatism battle it out in the heart of a good man.
Carefully paced ... filled with the rich details of rural medieval life, but the unique structure of the story gives the novel a fresh and modern sensibility. In addition, Oakham’s remoteness and parochial village church is contrasted with the spiritual changes coming to both England and the rest of Europe, bringing to mind contemporary issues such as Brexit and the refugee crisis ... Harvey, whose previous novels have been nominated for a range of prizes including the Man Booker, has written a densely packed historical novel that never seems dusty or precious, relishing in the psychological intricacies of power and faith but still crackling with suspense and intrigue.
[The book contains] an intriguing structure and not at all expected for this kind of story, but Harvey is a brilliant writer, and the framework only strengthens the plot ... As soon as I was done, all I wanted to do was read it over again. There were so many things at the beginning of the book the significance of which I didn't understand until the end ... Beyond the structure, Harvey's writing is beautiful and profound. As I read, I underlined so many passages that my copy of the book became full of the tape flags I used to mark my highlights. Harvey inhabits Reve's mind so completely, she draws you in so that his thoughts become your thoughts and his questions become your questions ... Harvey's brilliance lies in her ability to humanize and complicate her characters, to give them lives and loves and losses, jealousies and pain and secrets.
Remarkable and often beautiful, well enough written to be called exhilarating, even if the story itself is anything but that ... darkly atmospheric, descriptions of weather, scenery, the village and the harsh lives of the parishioners darkly convincing. 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 ... Yet, despite this imaginative leap, and Harvey’s ability to conjure up a world so very different in thought and faith from the one which most of her readers will inhabit, there is something abstract or perhaps unanchored about this novel ... a novel by a very talented author, one which is often beautifully and evocatively written, clever in structure, and decidedly unusual. If it seems to me not quite to have come off, I’m certain that many good judges will be enthusiastic and think it a more complete success, a novel that will surely feature on prize shortlists.
Evokes the darkness of both winter and spirit with stark yet lovely imagery ... this compulsively readable portrait of doubt and faith reveals, in small lives, humanity’s biggest questions.
Harvey writes with a beautiful ease. Her passages of nature writing, describing this strange, left-behind landscape, are evocative. She wraps you in the language of ritual and liturgy: albs, amices, shriving bells ... However, it’s a book that could do with a bit more carnival. It is lyrical and literary, but, like a Lenten fast, it is thin on fun, incident and cheer ... promises tempests and blows a gentle breeze.
Harvey weaves a dazzling tapestry around loss and confession in late-15th-century England in this breathtaking novel ... The lush period details and acute psychological insight will thrill fans of literary mysteries and historical fiction. This is an utterly engrossing novel.
Harvey has subtly crafted a complex narrative ... 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.
Samantha Harvey's new novel, The Western Wind, does not indulge in the tropes of medieval whodunits: There is no talk of witches or heretics, no reminiscences of plagues past or foreshadowing of religious crusades to come or even monks with secret codes hidden in illuminated manuscripts ... The Western Wind is a richly detailed portrait of a small, poor village, its focus firmly on human nature and resilience in the face of various trials from illness to poverty to loneliness to despair ... While the mystery is compelling, Harvey's lyrical and inventive prose is reason enough to read the book.
