Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Janina and the Deaths

The Silesian plateau in winter: a landscape of low mountains, dark forests, and a scattered village community where Janina Duszejko lives alone, maintaining the holiday cottages of neighbors who have left for the city. She is somewhere past sixty, a former bridge engineer who now teaches English to children, translates William Blake with her young friend Dizzy, and maintains elaborate astrological charts for everyone she knows and for every creature she cares about, which is to say for every animal she encounters.

The deaths begin with Big Foot, a hunter whose name Janina refuses to use — she insists throughout on renaming the novel’s characters by their essential qualities rather than their given names, a habit that is both comic and pointed. Big Foot is found dead near his home under circumstances the police find unexplained. More hunters follow. The local police, including the good-natured Commandant, are puzzled and largely dismissive of Janina’s theories, which involve the animals of the forest taking systematic revenge for the violence done to them during hunting season.

Janina’s relationship with her friends Oddball (the neighbor) and Good News (the young woman from the village) provides the novel’s warmth, set against the cold of the Silesian winter and the cold indifference of the authorities. She writes formal complaints to every institution she can think of about the hunting that continues around her, and every institution ignores her. She is, by every conventional measure, an eccentric old woman who talks too much about animal rights and astrology. Tokarczuk is very deliberate about establishing this characterization before the plot demands that we take her seriously.

The Animal Justice System

Janina believes — not as metaphor, not as whimsy, but as a serious philosophical and spiritual position — that animals have souls, that they experience suffering with the same moral weight as human suffering, and that the systematic killing of animals for sport is an evil of the same order as other historical evils that were once considered normal. She quotes Blake constantly: “The cut worm forgives the plow,” “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”

Tokarczuk’s great formal achievement in the novel is that she takes Janina’s cosmology seriously. The astrological charts are not character decoration — they function in the plot. The animal-revenge theory is not simply wrong in the way that eccentric theories are wrong in conventional detective fiction. The resolution of the mystery requires accepting, at least provisionally, the logic of a world in which animals have standing, in which the categories of victim and perpetrator might be extended beyond the human.

The eco-feminist argument is embedded so thoroughly in the narrative structure that it cannot be extracted without dismantling the novel. Janina’s dismissal by the authorities is not incidental context — it is the argument. The woman who is right about everything is the woman who is dismissed as a crank. The hunters who are wrong about everything — about their relationship to the natural world, about the cost of their pleasures, about what the forest owes them — are the respectable members of the community. The novel’s politics are not stated; they are the shape of the story.

Tokarczuk’s Range

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was published in Polish in 2009, a decade before Tokarczuk’s Nobel Prize was announced, but it reached anglophone readers in Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation in 2018 — just as the Nobel announcement (awarded for 2018, delayed and announced in 2019) was bringing international attention to Tokarczuk’s work. The timing made it the ideal entry point for new readers.

It is the most accessible point in a demanding body of work. Flights (2007, International Booker Prize 2018) is a formally fragmented novel about travel and the human body, requiring patience with digression and non-linear structure. The Books of Jacob (2014, National Book Award for translated fiction 2021) is a nearly 1,000-page historical epic about an eighteenth-century Jewish false messiah. Drive Your Plow is, by comparison, a genuine genre novel — it has a mystery plot, a first-person narrator with a strong and consistent voice, chapters of manageable length, and a resolution that satisfies. Lloyd-Jones’s translation catches Janina’s voice perfectly: the formal English she uses (she is an English teacher) carries a deliberate archaic quality that makes her seem not merely eccentric but ancient, like someone who has always been here.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Tokarczuk’s most gripping and politically clear-eyed novel: a murder mystery that takes its eccentric narrator’s cosmology seriously and demands that we do the same.