By Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead is a beautifully-written and philosophically intriguing novel with strong animal rights undertones.
Note- this book review contains spoilers
About the Book
Title: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Author: Olga Tokarczuk
Published: 2009
Genre: fiction, mystery, literary fiction
My Rating: 5/5 stars
The Premise
Synopsis (from Goodreads):
In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind …
My Thoughts
Janina Duszejko is the anti-hero and narrator of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. An eccentric and elderly woman who lives in a remote village, she has a strong connection to and respect for animals, as well as an obsession with astrology and the poetry of William Blake, which she translates into Polish with one of her neighbors.
The story kicks off when Janina and the neighbor she nicknames Oddball find another person in their neighborhood dead, apparently from choking on a bone of the deer he hunted and ate.
Animal Rights in Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead
As the story continues on, we learn more about Janina’s life, her various quirks and eccentricities, her love for her two dogs, whom she calls her Little Girls, and her relationships with her neighbors. We also become privy to her thoughts about hunting, which she views as a barbarity. This is when this book dropped one of the most pro-vegan quotes I’ve ever seen in mainstream fiction:
“The nastiest criminal has a soul, but not you, beautiful Deer, nor you, Boar, nor you, wild Goose, nor you, Pig, nor you, Dog.’ Killing has become exempt from punishment. And as it goes unpunished, nobody notices it anymore. And as nobody notices it, it doesn’t exist. When you walk past a shop window where large red chunks of butchered bodies are hanging on display, do you stop to wonder what it really is? You never think twice about it, do you? Or when you order a kebab or a chop—what are you actually getting? There’s nothing shocking about it. Crime has come to be regarded as a normal, everyday activity. Everyone commits it. That’s just how the world would look if concentration camps became the norm. Nobody would see anything wrong with them.”
I have seen other reviewers label Janina’s views on animal rights as “extreme”, but I 100% agree with her. It was extremely refreshing to see, and I learned that Olga Tokarczuk herself is a vegetarian. (One must wonder whether she knows about the atrocities perpetuated by the egg and dairy industries, but I digress)
What is extreme, however, is the rest of Janina’s actions throughout the story.
More and more people end up dead, mostly powerful men in the village. Interestingly, all of them are hunters– and Janina tries in vain to get people to take seriously the theory that the animals are killing these men in revenge for hunting. The book raises questions here about how society takes some people more seriously than others, and how a woman like Janina is so easily dismissed. This reminded me a lot of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in her Hands, and in fact one of the reasons I picked up Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead on the recommendation of someone who said it reminded them of Moshfegh’s work.
At the end of the novel, and in keeping with the foreshadowing of the rest of the book, it is revealed that it was Janina herself who was going around killing the hunters. In her mind, this is justice because they killed animals indiscriminately, including her dogs.
Obviously, her choice to kill people was not morally right, but this narrative choice raises interesting questions about morality with regard to killing nonhuman animals. What is the difference between poaching and hunting– one is legally sanctioned, and the other isn’t. Janina’s murders put this question into stark relief, as she frames her violence as “poaching.” To her, killing is killing.
Religion and Speciesism in Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead
One of the most interesting parts of this book, in my opinion, was the ending, when the town has a Mass for the Catholic patron saint of hunters, St. Hubert. Sitting in the church, Janina is unable to contain herself and bursts into a tirade about the hypocrisy and perversity of celebrating animals by encouraging their killing.
I have long said that religion is a prime contributor to human supremacy and speciesism, and this scene did a stellar job of introducing this concept.
“It occurred to me that if there really was a Good God, he should appear now in his true shape, as a Sheep, Cow, or Stag, and thunder in a mighty tone, he should roar, and if he could not appear in person, he should send his vicars, his fiery archangels, to put an end to this terrible hypocrisy once and for all”
Mortality and Suffering in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
The final theme that I found memorable from this book was Janina’s musings about death, mortality, and suffering. I have a rather strong and unwanted obsession with death, so I could relate to her constant thoughts about the futility and shortness of life, as well as the inherent violence in existence. It was again refreshing to see some of my thoughts represented in the prose of this novel. That’s the best thing about reading, I think– when an author seems to understand you.
“I spent ages pondering what the Grey Lady had said. And I think it tallies with one of my Theories – my belief that the human psyche evolved in order to defend us against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defence system – it makes sure we’ll never understand what’s going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.”
Overall, this book was very memorable, and I will certainly be seeking out more novels by Olga Tokarczuk.
Have you read Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk? If so, what did you think? Feel free to let me know in the comments!
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