posted on 23 Feb 2023

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

By a curious coincidence, Letterpress is reviewing novels by two of the more recent Eastern European women Nobel laureates. The first review, Elfrieda Jalenek’s The Piano Teacher, is here. The second, the subject of this review, is Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. 

Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018, the year in which Drive Your Plow was first published in the UK in a superb translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

It is a sort of eco-thriller, perhaps even an existential Polish-noir, as I have seen it described in some reviews (of which more later). I found the world it depicts utterly captivating, right from the very first page. 

Its central character and narrator (perhaps an reliable one) is Janina Duszejko, a Polish woman in her sixties, prone to an ever-lengthening list of physical (and possibly psychic) ailments. She hates her first name and is known to herself and to everyone else in the tiny rural hamlet in the Kłodzko Valley in south-western Poland as Mrs Duszejko. She is a former civil engineer and now part-time teacher who in addition to her sessional teaching earns a little extra money as a sort of caretaker. Mrs Duszejko and a handful of others live in the country all year-round, but most of her neighbours use their cottages only as summer dachas and depend on Mrs Duszejko to look after their homes through the harsh winters. 

She passes her time in casting horoscopes, feeding the local wildlife, walking her beloved dogs, visiting neighbours and helping Dizzy, a young man whom she once taught and is very fond of, translate William Blake’s poetry and letters into Polish. The symbolism of astrology and Blake’s visions and revelations are central to the story.

This quiet, detailed, mordantly funny background is beautifully and lovingly sketched in as the novel progresses. I found the character of Mrs Duszejko and her immediate neighbours and friends compelling and utterly convincing. The tone darkens as she begins to obsess about the depredations and environmental damage caused by locals who are all members of a hunting club: amongst them are her nearest neighbour, ’Bigfoot’, a thuggish and obstreperous drunk; a dubious businessman who runs a fur farm, a slaughterhouse, a restaurant, and a brothel; a corrupt police commandant; and a hypocritical priest. 

The novel is something of a shaggy dog story, content to slowly unfold the small details of these closely observed but insignificant lives. It becomes tenser and darker when one of the hunters is murdered. And then another. And another.

I won’t spoil the plot by revealing its details here but I will say something about the ‘crime novel’ aspect of the book. I have read some reviews suggesting that the novel works perfectly well as a murder mystery and requires no deeper reading. Personally, I’m not entirely convinced that this is the case. I found the murder mystery element the least compelling part of the book and relished it rather for the quality of its writing, the beautifully observed lives it depicts and the themes that inform it: environmentalism, capitalist greed and destruction, inequality, power, and the justice of the powerless.

At the same time, however, I would resist depicting it as an ‘issues novel’, which seems an all too common trend nowadays – as if the ideas of fiction must be painted in poster colours. It is probably true to say that the novel is the work of a quite specific sensibility – feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, ecological, militantly vegetarian – but to regard it primarily as an ‘issues novel’ is to diminish its accomplishment. This kind of literalism was applied to the novel on its publication in Poland, where it was condemned as ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘unchristian’ and said to promote ‘eco-terrorism’.

I haven’t read anything else by Olga Tokarczuk but will now probably do so – albeit choosing carefully because her work seems to cover an astonishing range. For example, she has written an illustrated novel for adults and younger readers, as well as what many regard as her masterpiece, an almost 1,000-page novel about Jacob Frank, a charismatic eighteenth-century Jewish mystic. 

Drive Your Plow is a work of genuine literary significance and I found it as thought-provoking as it is fully realised in its imagining. Most importantly, I also found it compulsively readable and hugely enjoyable – the kind of novel that will stay vividly in the mind.

Of the seventeen women writers who have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, eight are from Eastern or Central Europe and of these most have become laureates in the past twenty years (you can read more about some of them in this piece on the Book Forum website). I haven’t read anywhere near enough of them and certainly on the evidence of Drive Your Plow must address this.

 

Alun Severn

February 2023