Review: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a well constructed and unconventional murder mystery that features Janina Duszejko, who is well into her sixties. A bridge-construction engineer until ill health put a stop to that career, she then became a school teacher. Now in retirement, she lives in a remote Polish hamlet near the border of the Czech Republic and is the caretaker of several nearby holiday homes which are left vacant during the severe winters of the region. She is a woman of strong convictions and describes her likes and dislikes forcefully but not without a touch of humour. She is frustrated at being dismissed as a silly old woman, but she takes advantage of that status.

Duszejko refuses to be called Janina because she hates that name. She prefers to refer to people she knows by names that suit their personality or appearance, hence one neighbour is called ‘Big Foot’ and another ‘Oddball’; a friend is named ‘Good News’. An unnamed long-since departed spouse is dismissed in one sentence.

Duszejko is a fanatical believer in astrology. When she is asked why some people are evil and nasty she replies, ‘The traditional ancient Astrology of Ptolemy tells us it’s down to Saturn’. Her friends have other ideas:

‘A toxic mother’; ‘an authoritarian father’; ‘sexual abuse in childhood’; ‘not being breastfed’; ‘television’; A lack of lithium and magnesium in the diet’ or ‘post-traumatic shock.’

But Duszejko remains convinced that the cause is Saturn in ascendency. 

Astrology is not her only passion, however. She is a devotee of the poet William Blake, from whose work the title of this novel is taken. With her friend Dizzy, Duszejko works on translating the works of Blake into Polish. The reader is treated to three trial translations of Blake’s opening stanza from ‘The Mental Traveller’ and to the finally agreed-upon version, and thus gains a delightful insight into the nuances of language and the skills required for the challenge of translating poetry.

Duszejko also believes that animals have the same right as humans do to live a good life. Consequently she is a strong and unpopular voice in a community where hunting animals is a tourist attraction as well as a local pastime – one blessed by the clergy, no less. The local police berate her for speaking out but that does not stop her writing letters of complaint to the authorities – letters which are ignored.

When a a number of murders is committed, the clues are there for the discerning reader, although Duszejko does not act as the typical single-minded detective who outperforms the police. She recounts events from the vantage of an intelligent observer willing to share her personal opinions. These are leavened by her astrological beliefs, and her love of animals, and also by a range of opinions on many subjects such as how to deal with bad dreams by recounting them ‘aloud above the toilet bowl, and then flush[ing] them away’.

This novel is a delightful potpourri of astrological and philosophical musings that add flavour to an interesting plot. It questions the ethics of hunting animals for sport and not least it reminds us that it just might be worthwhile to spend more time listening attentively to the advice of elderly retired women.