Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk

ERA book club generally liked this unusual book by Olga Tokarczuk. It’s a novel with an eco theme, first published in Poland in 2009. It has not dated at all. Billed as a kind of detective story, it really focuses on themes of character, human relations with the natural world, love for animals, belonging, politics (especially the brutish kind), small rural communities and borders. There is plenty of dark humour and also grief and horror, plus astrology, which is taken very seriously, and a good amount of William Blake’s poetry - a difficult book to sum up then, but do give it a try if you haven’t already.

The main character is sixty-ish Janina, a retired English teacher who acts as caretaker for weekenders in a pretty little village in Silesia. The portrait of village life is unromantic. Rural communities are shown as less tolerant and civilised than the local city of Wroclaw. ERA book club members divided over whether the rough justice meted out to some characters was enjoyable or not. The back cover of the paperback says this novel ‘caused a genuine political uproar in Tokarczuk’s native Poland’.

The meeting of urgent philosophical concerns with vividly imagined characters is particularly stimulating. At no point does the novel tell the reader what to think. Instead you enter emotionally into a world that is relatable but strange enough to experience freshly. It leaves behind a strong resonance.