A bridge engineer turned schoolteacher, now reluctantly in retirement, she is devoted to Blake, and to studying astrological charts in order to make sense out of chaos. Janina tells us on the first page that she is “already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night”. But a mere whodunit would hardly satisfy a novelist who said “just writing a book to know who is the killer is wasting paper and time”, and so it is also a primer on the politics of vegetarianism, a dark feminist comedy, an existentialist fable and a paean to William Blake. It is, in effect, a murder mystery: in the bleak Polish midwinter, men in an isolated village are being murdered, and it is left to Janina Duszejko, a kind of eastern European Miss Marple, to identify the murderer. I look forward to reading more of Olga Tokarczuk’s writing, hopefully translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, whose work here is outstanding.The novel is almost impossible to categorise.
Like Drive Your Plow, this earthy thriller full of cosmic thinking, she is unforgettable. She’s peaceable and belligerent in equal measure, pitiable and frightening at the same time. It’s a rare protagonist who contains so many eccentric, often contradictory notions, but Janina is somehow totally believable. She holds a wide range of pet theories (‘Theory’ is also always capitalised), leading to many brilliant digressions: on the ‘testosterone autism’ of middle-aged men, on how weather reports offer a useful typology of all people, on overused expressions, on ‘Lazy Venus syndrome’, on the beautiful art of translation (her buddy Dizzy whiles away hours crafting Polish versions of William Blake), on the power of Anger. It’s a clue to her intense respect for the natural world. All animals she encounters have their nouns capitalised, and some are granted names (as with Consul, the fox that criss-crosses the Czech border). She rejects most given names for people, preferring labels that sum up her immediate impression of their character or physicality – hence Bigfoot, Oddball, Good News, The Grey Lady, and more. The early chapters signal Janina’s singular perspective on the world. She’s among the very few who can tolerate the dreadful winters there, and among of the first on the scene when a neighbour turns up dead one snow-laden night. Meet Janina Duszejko, semi-retired school teacher and amateur astrologer, who leads a quiet life on a tough plateau in rural Poland.
Though it’s a fine multiple-murder mystery, it’s the narrator who makes Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead such a compelling read.
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