Right on the eve of Lent, the godforsaken medieval English village of Oakham wakes up to find that it has lost its richest, enterprising, educated and generous inhabitant. In the evening, Tom Newman had fun at the wedding of the priest's sister, and the next morning he disappeared in the waves of the local river, swollen due to the spring flood: either he accidentally slipped into the water, going to inspect the remains of the collapsed bridge, or decided to commit suicide, or became a victim of whose something of malice. Even his body was not found - only a young pupil of Newman, Harry Carter, found in the coastal reeds the torn and dirty shirt of his benefactor.
Samantha Harvey has completed postgraduate courses in philosophy and in Creative Writing. In addition to writing, she has traveled extensively and taught in Japan and has lived in Ireland and New Zealand. She recently co-founded an environmental charity and lives in Bath, England.
Meanwhile, clouds are gathering over the village: greedy and unprincipled monks from a neighboring monastery have long been buried on its fertile lands, a church leader who has arrived from a neighboring city in Oakham suspects sedition among the parishioners, and a local lord, who seems to be destined to play the role of defender of humble farmers, on in fact, nothing more than a weak-willed dreamer. And now their future directly depends on how quickly the Oakem residents will be able to find out what happened to Tom Newman.
The novel is narrated from the perspective of the young priest John Reeve, who for the most part has to deal with what happened, and it is built from end to beginning: we meet the heroes on Pancake Tuesday, crowning Shrovetide, and we part four days earlier, on Forgiven Saturday, when in fact, Tom Newman disappears. Such a structure immediately denotes the futility of any hopes for a "normal" development of detective intrigue: despite the fact that the center of Samantha Harvey's novel is indeed a murder, and in the finale the reader will receive some semblance of a clue to what happened, West Wind is definitely not a detective story. the usual sense of the word. The true space of action in it is the soul of the protagonist, and the main plot is the throwing that takes place in this soul, which we observe in the opposite perspective, by the way, so characteristic of medieval iconography.
At the most superficial, obvious level, the "West Wind" is extremely consonant with our current perception of the Middle Ages - the one for the formation of which in Russian realities, perhaps, the creators of the "Suffering Middle Ages" public are most responsible. The English 15th century appears here in the guise of both grotesque, funny, eerie, obscenely square and at the same time lofty spiritual - in a word, not at all like the once popular romantic ideal. In the rustic, dense and impoverished world of Samantha Harvey, where a banal stove in the house marks a fair prosperity, there is no place for exalted chivalry (there are no knights here either), and the whole aesthetics of the novel quite unambiguously goes back to the famous painting by Pieter Bruegel "The Battle of Maslenitsa and Lent ".
However, recognizable, historically reliable and if not comfortable, then in any case the already familiar entourage serves as a shell for a personal tragedy in the spirit of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky rather than Geoffrey Chaucer or François Rabelais. The reader will soon discover that the protagonist of The West Wind, the young priest John Reeve, is not a completely reliable storyteller and has something to hide. John exhausts under the weight of other people's expectations, and this unbearable burden forces him to make one mistake after another. Worse, John's own demons are raging in his soul, with which he is not always able to cope, and this circumstance only lends itself to the heat in that fiery hell, into which he is cast.
A weak person, by the will of a blind chance, responsible for the fate of many; an eternal loser, forced to rely on luck; a coward on the front lines; a completely fanatical sinner forced to rely on the righteousness and faith of others - the drama of John Reeve unfolds in several directions at once, and following this intense, secret and painful process is no less, and perhaps much more interesting than finding out the circumstances of Tom's death Newman.
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This article was sponsored by Bart Lipiec
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