Winds of the Night
Joan Sales
MacLehose Press, £14.99
Review by Alastair Mabbott
JOAN Sales himself seems to have understood that a question mark hung over whether Winds of the Night was the second half, sequel or coda to his great Spanish Civil War novel (and “Catalan classic”), Uncertain Glory. Greatly expanded from a final chapter entitled “Latest News” in the original 1956 publication, Winds of the Night was finally split off into a novel in its own right at the behest of Sales’ granddaughter in 2012, and this is its first English edition.
It’s told in the first-person by Cruells, one of Uncertain Glory’s several protagonists. Cruells was a priest-in-training who abandoned his studies to fight on the Republican side in the war, returning to join the priesthood after his release from a French concentration camp. The novel is structured around a series of encounters spread over several years between Cruells and Lamoneda, who had been a fascist agent provocateur inciting anarchists to greater heights of violence. Playing on Cruells’ eagerness to discover the fate of his old comrade Soleràs, Lamoneda diverts each of their meetings into rambling rants about the war, the inheritance he’s been cheated out of and the novel he’s been writing.
As the second half of Uncertain Glory, these interminable monologues would shed new light on earlier events and deepen our understanding of the story. In isolation, they’re frustrating, assuming a knowledge of characters about whom, even after reading Paul Preston’s Afterword, we only have a sketchy idea. It isn’t clear why Cruells should be so obsessed with Soleràs, although it’s eventually revealed that he thinks he could be a “unique friend” whose companionship would make him happy. All we actually get to see of Soleràs is in Lamoneda’s scathing reports of their perplexing conversations during the war.
Deprived of context, we have no choice but to fall back on reading Winds of the Night as a depiction of the state of mind of a broken, despairing priest, at which it succeeds admirably. Directing much of his testimony to God in impassioned, often fevered prose, Cruells can’t let go of the “delirious madness” of the Spanish Civil War, lamenting the passing of his youth and admitting that, since it ended, he’s been a “ghost who was floating adrift”. At the same time, he is tormented by the horrors of the 20th Century that brought forth fascism and the kind of warfare that did his psyche so much damage. Ironically, his sense of futility and crushing defeat is mirrored by Lamoneda, who was on the winning side but shares his disappointment.
So, read as a novel in isolation, Winds of the Night throws up problems for the reader. But that undersells Cruell’s neurotic complexity, and the claustrophobic intensity Sales has brought to this story of a priest tortured by self-contemplation and reluctantly bound to a man he hates. Nevertheless, the exercise of splitting them off just seems to prove the wisdom of Sales’ original intention: that the best way to approach Winds of the Night is to read Uncertain Glory first.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here