Book of the week

The ostensible premise as a whodunit belies the author’s deep political and craft motivation.

Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (Text) $37 Winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her novel Flights, Polish author Olga Tokarczuk is an author very much in vogue. Her literary concern with borders and environmentalism are those at the forefront of contemporary European and global politics. First published in her native country in 2008, the dark, intriguing book Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is freshly released in translation, thanks to its recent adaptation into a movie, Potok by Oscar-nominated director Agnieszka Holland.

At the heart of Drive Your Plow

Over the Bones of the Dead is its eccentric heroine-narrator, Janina Duszejko. When not teaching English to local schoolkids in her remote village, she’s railing against the hunting of deer, the inflexible strictures of religion and the travails of caring for holiday homes which straddle the nearby CzechPolish border. Murder of the native wildlife is soon conjoined by murder of her neighbours, beginning with a passionate hunter, euphemistically referred to as Bigfoot.

Euphemisms are everywhere in Tokarczuk’s novel, layered in a way which is, by turns, surprising, powerful and provocative. Beyond Bigfoot, Janina’s comically accurate definition of the locals – Oddball, Dizzy, Commandant, Black Coat – speaks to a wider control the narrator has over narrative and plot. We only know the story we’re told: this is as much a political as literary principle. Janina tells us only the version of events – a series of unfolding, seemingly disparate deaths set against the machinations of smallminded village politics – she wants to tell; this being only the version she wants us to know.

With euphemism as a symbol of a wider authorial playmaking, the result is a book which immerses us in that wonderfully adaptable literary stalwart, the unreliable narrator.

Janina is never quite what she seems. So, when not revealing her twisted, bloodthirsty yarn, she meditates upon her passion for the poetry of that skilled metaphysical wordsmith William Blake, and the vague promulgations of astrology. In reality, of course, she – like Tokarczuk – is working hard beneath the surface of the novel, an elegant swan afloat upon water, to remind us no one ever is quite what they seem. In this, the use of language to bend in and out of meanings is always on show. Skilfully translated by prize winning Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the book illustrates the manipulative, political power of word and phrasing.

Following the recent popularity of European novelists such as Elena Ferrante and Stieg Larsson, Olga Tokarczuk is part of a new wave of European writers gaining international notoriety. The ostensible premise as a whodunit belies the author’s deep political and craft motivations at the core of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.

– Siobhan Harvey