During his last meeting with the woman, the priest seems constantly about to renounce his vocation and follow his passion. It is this inability to assert one’s will that gives the situation its intensity. In the dialogue between the mother and the son, the priest and the woman, the passions never explode forth or dominate. There are no D.H. Lawrence style arguments or confrontations. The dilemna confronting the major characters is acted out inside their own mind and not with each other. We are shown the situation first through the mother’s eyes: a woman who has sacrificed everything to make her son a priest and sees it all about to be lost by his rashness. To be a priest is to escape the misery of being poor, not to follow God. It is the path of the ambitious peasant mother who wants her son to succeed in life. As the book proceeds she wavers in her steadfastness, seeing in her son’s desire to have a woman nothing unreasonable and pities him in his predicament. Having renounced for herself the very things her son wants she can accept that he should have them, despite the problems this would cause. The dilemna is unresolved in her mind. She seems ready to go where the wind will blow her.

The son, whose priesthood is a mixture of ambition and vocation, reflects on his earlier sensual experiences. It is as if the past on which he closed the door with his vow of celibacy is reasserting itself. There is something of Adam enjoying the forbidden fruit in his pleasure, without the bravado to face the consequences of his actions. Although he lacks the courage to leave with Agnes, there is the feeling that if she had been able to assert herself she would have had her way and the priest would have followed her. The book ends with Agnes renouncing revenge and accepting the responsibilities of her position in society. It is her acceptance not to act which gives the story its ending. The lack of a clear decision from anyone and the passive acceptance of what is easier makes the story modern in its tone. Temptation and its rejection, in an Old Testament biblical, if not primevil way, dominates a lot of Grazia Deledda’s work. Not so here. Nothing is rejected, temptation conjures morality with only weakness leaving the characters conforming to what society sees as their duty.

The power of the book is in the emotional intensity and claustrophobia which builds up within the characters, while everything is muted in the outer world. This gives a heightened effect to the subdued dialogue and controlled exchanges of the characters with the reader sharing in their anxiety, willing them to do something and decide, rather than drifting into passivity and the acceptance not to act. We are yelling for them, putting words in their mouth which do not fit comfortably into the primitive world of Sardinia. It is here where the books fascination lies. What is fundamentally a modern tale about human relationships complicated by social values rests on a world anchored in the never changing past. The paganism of these simple people’s religion; the hunter with his strange ways; the exorcism and the overriding superstitions and the belief in the supernatural conjure up a world which has no place in the twentieth century.