The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey
MINOO DINSHAW The Western Wind By Samantha Harvey Jonathan Cape £16.99 Oldie price £14.93 inc p&p
Novelists who deny a specific date to what appears to be an historical setting grasp at the numinous and timeless, but all too often pay a price in solidity. Those, more traditional, who share with their readers their plot’s specific point in the past, must contend with, master and incorporate a whole supplementary world of detail and dramatis personae, of varying relevance to their story.
In her fourth novel, Samantha Harvey arrives at a particularly ingenious compromise. She concedes a date, 1491, unlikely to mean very much either to us or, it is soon evident, to her characters.
At one point, Harvey’s narrator, a youngish village priest, John Reve, refers to kings as a commonly plural noun, like aldermen or crows. On account of the civil wars – in The Western Wind distant but destabilising, not yet dubbed by Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott after roses – Reve’s inexactitude feels thrillingly precise. Of more moment to the late medieval mind – comprehensively evoked by Harvey – is the slow, folkloric regularity of a liturgical calendar that slipped into semi-pagan custom: Shrove Tuesday, Collop Monday, Guessing Sunday, Egg Saturday.
Harvey’s contents pages present us with days headed backwards, a harmonious marriage of the author’s aesthetic experimentalism and her narrator’s exact predicament. The novel’s playful outer layer is swathed in the genre of historical detective fiction. In an obscure, watery West Country village, Oakham (not to be confused with the capital of Rutland), the richest landowner, a benevolent parvenu named Newman, appears to have drowned.
The rural dean has been called in to investigate, and here the novel’s true nature emerges from hiding. This dean is not the detective that he explicitly thinks he is (he compares himself to a ‘sheriff’, an historically accurate term that also deliberately calls to mind a very different kind of Western). Nor is he the bumbling Lestrade to our narrator Reve’s Holmes. What he is in the novel’s opening, as he pokes around, maddening priest and flock, is analogous to us, the puzzled readers. ‘Has anything murderous come to light?’ ‘We know Tunley had poison at around the time…’ ‘I suppose I think about things too much…’ ‘Newman had been buying up Townshend’s land, hadn’t he?’
Then Harvey and Reve take us, with the dean, painstakingly back day by day, apparently ever frustratingly further from the quarry whose scent we’ve sniffed. Our priest, passionately sympathetic to the plight of his isolated parishioners, possesses the secrets of the confessional (a newfangled continental box he has insisted on installing to compete with confidential wayside friars). But he is obliged to yield them up for our and the dean’s consideration. The opacity of the novel’s first sections, with their intricate construction of assumed knowledge, means that, in fact, the further we go back, like any reader hooked by the past, the more we glean.
We absorb a surprisingly egalitarian and mobile social structure. Townshend, the notional lord of the manor, is an improvident cheesemonger on his way down. Newman embodies the fresh philosophies of the future – in music, commerce, art, religion and society – having become the intimate friend, it seems, of practically every villager.
A hardened sleuth may well work out the logical conclusion to which this inverse plot is headed; suffice to say, our confessor has himself a considerable secret to surrender. Many more innocent passengers will find a quick reread retrospectively rewarding. In any case, the journey is its own seamlessly consistent and convincing justification.
Harvey has captured an unconsciously sophisticated, morally muddled, truly good and truly interesting protagonist in a scene where human nature rebels against all legal, official, recorded conformities; yet she does so by way of an almost provocatively ordered and immaculate frame. Her poetically recurrent chapter titles give away her complex game from the start, forming an eerie singsong of palindrome.