The novel initially appears to follow the style of a detective story, as Reve assists the local dean in investigating Newman's disappearance and establishing if any of the villagers played a role in his death.
The dean settles on two suspects: the local landowner, Lord Townshend, and Sarah Spenser, a gravely ill woman who falsely confesses to Newman's murder.
Critics praised the book's lyrical prose and the construction of Reve as a character: several described him as an unreliable narrator.
In a 2018 interview, Harvey explained the choice of 1491 as "a moment in history just before everything changed", prior to the full effects of the Renaissance and the discovery of the New World.
The rural dean, who has come to Oakham to investigate Newman's disappearance, interrogates Reve, pressuring him to find more information to report to the archdeacon.
Reve muses on the threat to Oakham from the monks of Bruton Abbey, who desire to buy the village's land, and on the church's confessional box, which Newman had persuaded him to install after a visit to Rome.
Eithne Farry, in the Daily Express, gave the book five stars, describing Reve as "naive, clever, often foolish" and Harvey's prose as "luminous [and] wonderfully lyrical".
[10] Kirkus Reviews similarly praised the "pensive, false-medieval prose", and the use of repeating chapter titles to suggest an interplay between past, present and future.
[9] Angelini considered it "beautifully imagined", but felt that Reve's repeated disgressions into the nature of faith and humanity were "ponderous" and detracted from the novel's pace.
[7] The Scotsman praised Harvey's decision to avoid antiquated, medieval-style language, though considered that this contributed to a sense that the novel was "unanchored" from its fifteenth-century setting, and detracted from the authenticity of Reve as a character.
[14] Malcolm Forbes, in the Minnesota Star Tribune, linked Reve with the unreliable narrator of Harvey's first novel, The Wilderness, who has Alzheimer's disease.
[2] The Scotsman labelled the structure as "awkward, a bit tricksy, and perhaps irritating", but considered that its purpose became clear at the end of the novel, and was potentially satisfying once the reader understood Harvey's intention and "cleverness".
moments" for the reader, but wrote that it required a great deal of mental agility, and that re-reading the novel did not fully satisfy the questions raised about earlier chapters by the later parts of the story.
She also considered the passages in which Reve contemplates the nature of time an unnecessary indulgence, intended to justify Harvey's narrative decision.
[7] Cummins connected The Western Wind to Harvey's earlier novels via "her abiding theme of how easily memory – a matter of belief – can lapse into self-deception".
[7] Pittard wrote that the novel "miraculously captures the otherworldly, fish-out-of-water, discombobulating experience of being a liberal American today", citing its atmosphere of mistrust and the dynamic of "all-powerful know-it-all vs. frustrated citizenry".
[11] In the Arts Fuse, Katharine Coldiron compared the narrative structure with that of Ian McEwan's Atonement, in which the final section reveals the previous two to be fictional writings of one of the characters, and Harvey's prose with that of Marilynne Robinson.