The Western Wind – Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape 2018)

How unknowable men are, full of corners.

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If you want to know what it felt like to live in rural Somerset in 1491, this is the book for you. In fact, even if you don’t want to know, you should read it because it’s very good. It’s a murder mystery with all sorts of differences. Firstly – and I think this is useful to know when you start reading, even if it gives something away – the chronology of the explication moves backwards (over the three days leading up to Shrove Tuesday). Secondly, the ‘detective’ is the village priest, John Reve. He’s the first-person narrator who spends as much time agonising over the condition of his parish and its inhabitants as he does over the murder. And, thirdly, it’s not clear there’s actually been a murder. But no more on that.

Most of the story’s genius is in Harvey’s description of Oakham, its situation and its residents. They are brilliantly portrayed: superstitious and fearful; poor and kind; cut off from possible prosperity by a bend in the river. And, unbeknownst to most of them (but not our narrator), they’re under an additional threat from the neighbouring monastery. Of course, we learn all this from our priestly narrator who we accompany on his trips around the village performing some unusual ministries, and with whom we sit in his confessional box (the first in England, he believes), pot of beer at his feet, listening to the various sins, anxieties and musings of the villagers.

The characterization of John Reve is also part the book’s appeal. His wordsmithery is understated but brilliant: he describes the smell of hops and honey as ‘the hilt of a summer afternoon’, the ‘wound’s yellowy weep’ of a parishioner’s injury, and how the poor soil of Oakham’s fields meets a rake ‘as a fork meets melted fat’. Moreover, he offers period language and detail that never feels forced. There are citoles and nakers, carne levare, Pater, Creed and Ave. He’s a nervous narrator, under pressure from his superior to solve a crime that may not have been committed; but he’s also a funny man of genuine compassion, protective of his flock. He manages to make the list of standard sins he hears the Oakham folk confess to amusing without being patronizing, largely due to his own self-deprecating attitude.

And there are suspicious-sounding details offered from the start which, when combined with Reve’s anxiety over his own reliability as a narrator, get the reader jumping ahead with speculations. A moment’s hesitation in a witness’s statement; the same witness holding a piece of evidence aloft ‘as if there were people to see him’; Reve wondering ‘Was the light on the rushes even pink?’.

The revelations pile up as he works backwards through the three days, culminating in an explanation of the fraught opening scene. But, annoyingly, that explanation still wasn’t clear enough for me. I reread the start, hoping for more than ‘mere grey shapes in a shapeless grey’, but couldn’t answer all the questions. I defy you to.