What the Wind Knows

The title of the novel comes from something Eoin tells Annie: She doesn’t need to miss her mother because the wind outlasts humans and remembers them all. In the novel, wind symbolizes the connection between the past, present, and future. Even when Irish culture has been suppressed by the British occupation, the wind that blows across the island keeps the memory of old stories and the weight of history, spreading it from person to person—and even to the Irish diaspora abroad. When Annie travels through time, fog thickens the air on Lough Gill, an allusion to the wind that blows in the fog. The title “What the Wind Knows” is symbolic of all the things humans don’t know.

Thomas Smith’s journal ends each chapter in the novel. His journal entries reveal an alternate side of the story to the main narrator, Annie. This is symbolic of the power dynamics in historical storytelling. Who gets to decide what stories are told? Often, whoever recounts history ignores or is ignorant of other layers to the story. By including Thomas’s journal as a complement to Annie’s central narration, Harmon shows two nuanced sides of the same story. Furthermore, Thomas bears witness to enormously important moments in Irish history.