This was written by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, and published in 2009. The English translation, by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, came out in 2018, and my audio-version was very engagingly read by the translator herself.

It is undoubtedly an odd book, and it took me a little while to settle into it. But I ended up finding it quite brilliant.

It's set in a Polish hamlet in the Klodzko Valley, Silesia, a beautiful but bleak region that straddles the border with Czechia. Many of the houses are used only in the summer, and just a handful of people remain year-round.

The story opens with the death of one of these permanents. He has accidentally choked on a deer bone. Our narrator, an older woman named Janina Duszejko, is alerted to the man's demise by another neighbour, and the two take it upon themselves to dress the body in what they regard as more suitable clothes.

I'll refer to her as Mrs Duszejko, because she really hates being addressed as Janina. (One of her several idiosyncrasies is her dislike of people's given names. She feels they don't mean anything, and prefers to invent her own names for people. The dead deer-eater is therefore Big Foot, the corpse-dressing neighbour is Oddball, and other friends include Good News and Dizzy.)

Mrs Duszejko has never liked Big Foot. He's a poacher, and beats for the local hunters; he's cruel to his dog, something she has ineffectively reported to the police. If she's a kind of earth-mother, he's a hobgoblin.


Countryside, eastern and central Europe, 2023

It's Mrs Duszejko's strangeness that I initially found a little alienating. There's the astrology (she's compiling an extensive astrological database, "without funding from the European Union", and has computed the day of her death...). There's her ability to see her dead mother and grandmother. She has mysterious Ailments. And she Capitalizes Things (you wonder why the narrator is emphasizing words slightly oddly, and then you see an example of the printed page, and understand).

Above all, there's her viscerally-felt empathy with animals (her "Young Ladies" are the deer who come across from the Czech Republic; her "Little Girls" are the dogs who, we eventually find out, were shot by hunters). This fellow-feeling starts out on a kind of mystical level. We see her in tears over the body of a hunted boar -- "sorrow, I felt great sorrow, an endless sense of mourning for every dead Animal" -- and when a string of homicides succeeds Big Foot's death, she puts forward in all seriousness the idea that it is animals who are carrying them out. All the victims are associated with hunting, says our I-figure, and therefore it stands to reason that animals might well be exacting their revenge.

Running in tandem with these fey qualities, however, is an impassioned and burgeoning activism that condemns not only hunting but also meat-eating generally, and staunchly speaks out for animal rights. In Chapter 7, as she's attempting to report the illegal killing of the boar to the police, we hear what amounts to her manifesto: "What sort of a world is this? Someone’s body is made into shoes, into meatballs, sausages, a bedside rug, someone’s bones are boiled to make broth... Can it really be true? Is this nightmare really happening? This mass killing, cruel, impassive, automatic, without any pangs of conscience, without the slightest pause for thought... What sort of a world is this, where killing and pain are the norm? What on earth is wrong with us?"



I started unsure, but as the story progressed, I grew to admire Mrs Duszejko.

She's brave (some would say foolhardy). She confronts the hunters, the police, the priest who offers spiritual cover to the hunting fraternity. She speaks out; she refuses to back down.

She's also resilient. It can't be easy to stay through the winter in that demanding place. She's self-sufficient and practical, looking after her own and her neighbours' property.

But her ability to uncompromisingly acknowledge life's hardships and sorrows, and then to stare them down, is moving: "As I gazed at the black-and-white landscape of the Plateau, I realised that sorrow is an important word for defining the world. It lies at the foundations of everything, it is the fifth element, the quintessence."

We're slightly surprised (although we shouldn't be) to learn that she used to be a civil engineer, and had to quit because of ill health. Now, alongside her custodial duties, she does part-time English teaching at the local primary school. And, as well as advancing her astrological projects, she works with Dizzy, a former student and now a friend, on a project to translate the work of William Blake...

She also has a wry sense of humour (this is visible throughout, but perhaps the prime comedic scene comes when she and Oddball go to the mushroom pickers' ball dressed, respectively, as the Wolf and Little Red Riding-hood).



And, we learn eventually, Mrs Duszejko is a killer... The homicides are her doing.

I did start to suspect this quite early on, actually, although I couldn't figure out the "how" of it all, and kept doubting my intuition because the first death, Big Foot's, was very clearly accidental.

But Mrs Duszejko is an avenging angel. The catalyst is a photo she finds in Big Foot's house, showing all the future murder victims lording it over long rows of animal bodies -- among them her "Little Girls". From there, she was inspired, she says, by the Deer she saw in the vicinity that fateful night: "They chose me... [to] become the punitive hand of justice."

You don't condone what she has done. The author doesn't invite you to. But you also can't help feeling glad that she manages to evade the law... Her Ailments will probably take care of her soon enough anyway...



The novel caused a stir in Poland (the "2017 film adaptation, Spoor, caused one journalist to remark that it was 'a deeply anti-Christian film that promoted eco-terrorism'"), and Tokarczuk has been denounced as a "targowiczanin" (an ancient term for a traitor) by Polish nationalists. Conversely, the fictional character of Janina Duszejko has "become a protest figure in Poland; her name appeared on placards at the demonstrations to save the UNESCO-protected Bialowieza Forest from logging".

Tocarczuk certainly gives us plenty to chew on. The world of Drive Your Plow is one that's divided into masculine and feminine principles (not necessarily represented by the gender of the characters): Hunting versus nurturing; quarrying versus cultivating; exploiting versus protecting and respecting.

She also asks us to challenge the arbitrary distinctions we make between useful and useless. Mrs Duszejko seems to have questions about her usefulness (which of us doesn't by the time we reach a certain age?). She looks, for example, at Oddball's neatly arranged kitchen drawers, full of paraphernalia that he obviously takes great care of, and thinks: "I would really like to be one of those useful Utensils." Looking round at her strange collection of friends, towards the end of the book, she explains: "I realized that we were the sort of people whom the world regards as useless. We do nothing essential, we don’t produce important ideas, no vital objects or foodstuffs, we don’t cultivate the land, we don’t fuel the economy. We haven’t done any reproducing, except for Oddball, who does have a son... So far we’ve never provided the world with anything useful. We haven’t come up with the idea for any invention. We have no power, we have no resources apart from our small properties. We do our jobs, but they are of no significance for anyone else. If we went missing, nothing would really change. Nobody would notice." Then she rebels against this line of thinking: "But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right?... A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless."



Relatedly, in the persona of Mrs Duszejko, Tokarczuk ruthlessly exposes the position to which society tends to relegate older women. They become invisible, for one. Or the "old woman" readily morphs into "the mad old woman", if she dares to raise her head above the parapet. From there, it's just a short step to the sexist view that "mad old women" become obsessed with causes because they have nothing else to care about. Three steps towards silencing people... Well, Mrs Duszejko wouldn't be silenced...

I can't follow the narrator down her meatless path (and questions do arise: What about "the imprisonment of female animals to capture their secretions", and what did she feed her dogs...?). But the challenge to re-examine our attitudes to animals is very pertinent.

The poetry of William Blake plays a big role throughout the book. The title is from a Blake poem; each chapter opens with a quotation from his work; there is an amazing interlude where Dizzy and Mrs Duszejko produce and weigh up different translations of certain passages. McQuail, a Blake scholar, questions Tokarczuk's interpretations of Blake, while acknowledging that we're dealing with "a quintessentially unreliable narrator, and we can assume that she is unreliable about William Blake as well". Blake, I realize, represents another great void in my knowledge, so I make no comment.

In all, this is a fascinating melange of noir crime, philosophical treatise, and sociocultural commentary. A bravura performance.



In a 2022 essay entitled The Wanderer (translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft), Tokarczuk explains: "In what I write, I have always tried to steer the reader’s attention and sensitivity toward the whole. I’ve taken pains over total narrators, provoked with fragmentary forms, suggesting the existence of constellations that extend beyond a simple sum of composite parts and create their own meaning." Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a superb illustration of this vision.

I'll close by noting that I listened to a large part of this story on that long, long journey across the Romanian countryside to Budapest. At times I saw deer. Occasionally, a dog would chase the convoy of coaches. At one point there was an old lady, all by herself in her wheelchair, sitting by the side of the track watching the train...