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.