“Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,” a 2009 novel by Olga Tokarczuk, begins with a death and ends with a murder. It is as hard-hitting as it is meandering: a beautiful demonstration of how every good story is multi-layered no matter how short. What’s astonishing is just how much Tokarczuk stuffs into the 274-page novel while packaging it all up into a cohesive body that drives home a powerful message about hope.
Tokarczuk’s protagonist is an aged woman named Janina Duszejko who lives in a rural Polish village nestled alongside the Czech border. One snow-swept night, she’s awakened by banging on her door. It’s her neighbor, whom she calls Oddball, with a ghastly announcement: their other neighbor, a hunter named Bigfoot, is dead. The cause? A bone from a deer lodged in his throat. As more dead bodies crop up over the coming months, all sharing a connection to fauna (deer prints, snares, beetles), a theory—that animals are taking revenge on humans that mistreat them—crystallizes in Janina’s mind. This theory is a reflection of her own eccentricities, since Janina is not your average person.
In a rather polymathic manner, she holds a variety of occupations: bridge construction engineer, teacher, village winter guard, and a translator of William Blake’s poems. But beyond all of that, perhaps the most important aspect of Janina is her fervent devotion to astrology, a knowledge she claims is “just as scientific as psychology.” For her, everything is written in the stars, so her fate is like a prison, but at least horoscopes allow Janina to know her cell well.
The first person narration serves up a raw, unfiltered view of Janina’s sprawling mind. People are christened differently depending on their characteristics, which gives rise to such names as “Bigfoot” and “Black Coat,” and humorous chapter titles like “Testosterone Autism” make the novel read like a diary. Her observations are wry and witty, but also naive—for example, she sends her animal revenge theory along with horoscopes that back it up to the police, asking them to consult with their police astrologer.
One of Tokarczuk’s gifts is her power to make readers believe in Janina, no matter how outrageous she may seem. This is first person done right. Through Janina’s view, Tokarczuk captures the complexities of the human mind: a labyrinthian network of synapses firing, thoughts colliding and collaging into messy greatness.
Much of the plot is propelled by the conflict between her and the hunters, who enjoy high places in society but find joy in senseless death. The real tipping point in their relationship happens before the novel takes place, when Janina’s pet dogs—the loves of her life—go missing, most likely killed by a group of hunters. She is devastated, but in her town, everyone she turns to for help seems to be involved in the hunting culture themselves.
In Janina’s relentlessness in seeking justice for the creatures, the novel poses a central question: Why is the act of killing a human horrendous but the slaughtering of an animal acceptable, lauded, even? This philosophical underbelly is incredibly difficult to achieve without sacrificing readability. Many such novels get swallowed up in their own ambition and struggle to deliver a good balance of moral message intertwined with engaging plot, but Tokarczuk crafts a perfect equilibrium. She supplements the philosophical (which can easily turn leaden with dreariness) with humor and rage but also an exhibition of the stubborn humanity that remains within us.
This novel is great because it is timeless. The events could take place 10 years in the future or could have taken place 10 years in the past. This insulation makes it, even now, 15 years after the book was first published, just as important. It is impossible to box the book into a genre: it is simultaneously a murder mystery and environmental treatise and astrological guide and moral questioning. Still, the message remains the same, somehow undiluted by all of the content. Tokarczuk guides her readers on how to find hope in the dark times, and on how to find the courage to stand up against the mob for what is right.
The story, as most good tales are, is rife with death. But just as the Blake poem, Proverbs of Hell, that inspired the novel’s title, “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” teaches us that even in death, there are beginnings.
