Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Fascinating approach to a story.

It’s almost a great book but to me at age 78 not uplifting enough to evoke 5 stars out of my review.

It’s an enjoyable read for hard core environmentalists.

For readers who go beyond treating this novel as a whodunit, it’s the depth of characterization that has invited various interpretations of what the story is all about. It is an indictment of man’s rapacious attitude to his environment. It is an analysis of the mind of a special kind of killer. One whose motive stems from respect, love, and defense of the earth and all its creatures. A motive which might excuse the perpetrator in the minds of those who’ve lamented the destruction of nature. But for some who deplore violence of any kind, this defense can be easily argued in this particular story as revenge. Many have also seen it as condoning eco-terrorism.

Some call this a murder mystery, but to me it’s one of the most important books I recently read. The first person narrator words judgement on humankind for the methodical destruction of the natural world, the abuse of animals and plants for daily activities. It’s a frightening truth that we fail to acknowledge.
Dystopian but only slightly, this is about our times, our lives, the way we overuse our natural resources. It’s about human decency, about the hardships of communication and the existential crisis that cannot be avoided.

Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a funky novel. In the good sense of that term. It might loosely be called a Crime Novel, or even more loosely a ghost story. The publisher’s blurb ludicrously calls it an “existential thriller.” It is populated with eccentric characters, at the center of whom the sixty-year-old protagonist, Janina Duszejko, a philosopher of common sense and an astrologer, who prefers animals to people, moves with equanimity and self-possession. Her antagonists are considerable—a group of hunters, the police, a priest. Her good friends are few—a young programmer/translator, her curmudgeonly old neighbor, the young owner of a used clothing store. When the novel opens, her beloved dogs, her “little girls,” have gone missing, and soon members of the small Polish community begin to be murdered.

The element of crime exists only as a mildly interesting framework on which Olga Tokarczuk hangs the protagonist’s sometimes fascinating homespun philosophy, her faith in astrological signs, and her love of the half-mad, 19th-century English poet William Blake, whose work she is helping to translate, with her young friend Dizzy. Tokarczuk takes the title of the novel from Blake, begins each chapter with an epigraph from Blake, and puts Blake’s words often in her protagonist’s mouth. It all creates a wonderful witch’s brew of strange, mad, eccentric, quirky, and engaging confrontation with humanity’s ills. Physical ills, spiritual ills, psychological ills, social ills. All written with wry wit and insight into the human condition.

Here are a couple of examples of Janina Duszejko’s life observations. Early in the novel she reacts to her curmudgeon neighbor with this:

“With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he’s drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes; testosterone autism disturbs the character’s psychological understanding.”

Late in the novel, in response to someone’s bleak summary of life, she thinks,

“I spent ages pondering what the Grey Lady had said. And I think it tallies with one of my Theories—my belief that the human psyche evolved in order to defend us against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defense system—it makes sure we’ll never understand what’s going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.”

Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019. This is a beautiful novel, but it won’t be to every reader’s taste. It is slow moving, and the dramatic arc takes a while to materialize. My wife read the book before I did, and she said to me, “Just wait for it. It’s in the ending.” Well, I didn’t really need prodding. I had fallen in love with the protagonist early in the book. For those who read in order to live with interesting characters, I highly recommend this novel, with the caveat offered above. I doubt you will keep reading to find out who committed the crimes. More likely, you’ll read so you can enjoy a little more time with Janina Duszejko, so you can listen and be made to smile and to think.

Well this is an odd one. The author writes well but the plot seamed to go nowhere fast. It wondered around and I kept waiting for it to pick up… but nope. Some of the sentences were worth the cost of admission though. I would re-read and savor the word craft but the book as a whole is a pass.

Very clever