20. Poland

“Drive your plow over the bones of the dead” by Olga Tokarczuk.  Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

If you were to invent a parodic title for a certain type of European novel, I think this would be it.  An allusion to the peasant lifestyle that has sustained Europeans over the centuries, to a land filled with the residue of thousands of years of human habitation and conflict, and with the bleak sense of trudging on, into an uncertain future, burdened by the weight of history.

“Is it about the war?” said a British-Pole acquaintance when I told him what I was reading (and asked how to pronounce some of the names).  And, this book being from Poland, a country which suffered inordinately during the second world war, that was exactly what I had assumed when I stumbled across the title – before this won the Booker prize – at a brilliant book shop in an out of the way, Suffolk seaside town.

It is, in fact, nothing to do with the first or second world wars.  Instead it is a modern novel set in the isolated Polish countryside, somewhere near the border with the Czech Republic.  Janina Duszejko is an elderly lady living amongst a small hamlet of houses, most of which are only occupied in the summer. She braves the long winters with just two other neighbours, to whom she gives nicknames, the hated ‘Big Foot’ and the tolerated ‘Oddball’ (“I try my best never to use first names and surnames, but prefer epithets that come to mind of their own accord the first time I see a person” she tells us).  When Big Foot is found dead one winter’s night it is the start of a series of murders in the locality, which reach into the summer and autumn and pique the interest of Janina and her friends and neighbours in the nearby town.

Some reviews describe this as almost a detective story, complete with a Polish version of Miss Marple.  It’s more subtle than that.  In Agatha Christie evil appears in the form of a ruthless murderer who is rooted out by the central sleuth.  Here our narrator has just as keen a sense of good and evil, but it is hardly related to the murder of her various neighbours.  Instead she rails against the hunters who – in her eyes – murder the animals of the forest where she lives, or the fur trader who keeps hundreds of foxes caged on his farm and generally of the men (for it is men) who treat the countryside as a personal fiefdom, to be used for sport and pleasure. In the book, presented entirely in her voice, they are presented as grotesque, entitled, assumptive and ultimately feeble.

Mrs Duszejko, a teacher by background but now marooned as a caretaker of the abandoned summer houses, is magnificently realised in the narrative voice.  She is eccentric, fixed in her views, convinced of the justice of her beliefs  and in the truth of astrology which she practices and which provides a link with the mysticism of William Blake, whom she translates into Polish with a young friend – Dizzy.  The book’s title in fact comes from Blake’s Proverbs of Hell.  She does not care about conforming, or what others may think of her; I loved how her steadfast and rather practical attitude was exemplified in little things, such as her demand for a very specific jacket which betrays little sense of a need for social style or sophistication:

“‘I’d like a warm jacket […] to keep me warm and protect me from the rain.  I want it to be different from all the other jackets, not grey or black, not the kind that’s easily mistaken in the cloakroom.  I want it to have pockets, lots of pockets for keys, treats for the Dogs, a mobile phone, documents – then I won’t have to carry a bag and can keep my hands free.”

An awkward, elderly, female voice is seldom made the main protagonist in a novel (perhaps Miss Marple is the only other well-known example).  As in the real world, such a voice is usually dismissed by the other characters, appealing only to other misfits. 

Yet Mrs Duszejko is not a faultless heroine with whom the reader can unabashedly ally.  She is prone to damning and inflexible judgement on others with a certainty with which it is sometimes hard to empathise.  She is so disconnected from society that at times you wonder if she feels she may judge from a higher plane.  But her perspective is rather simplistic, almost child-like; she may be said to feel things too deeply, she anthropomorphises the world, particularly the natural world.  Consider for example, her stewardship of her neighbours’ houses; which betrays both her overly romantic view – in this case, inanimate houses – and her rather assumptive right to sit over them and make god-like observations:

“[A]t least once a day I’d go up the hill and conduct my usual surveillance through binoculars.  First I’d monitor the houses, of course.  In a sense, houses are living creatures that co-exist with Man in exemplary symbiosis.  My heart swelled with joy, for now it was plain to see that their symbionts had returned.  They had filled the empty interiors with their comings and goings, the warmth of their own bodies, their thoughts.”

Her exaltation of nature is also often hard to pin down: does she really love nature and animalkind, or has she reimagined it as something it’s not?  Is she assuming a role – the guardian of nature – she has neither the knowledge nor the subtlety for?  And is she right to see human life as on a par with animal life, as she is often accused of doing?

In a way I am glad that we can have some doubts about her character, it gives the book a texture which elevates it from a straightforward environmental polemic, or a tale of good versus bad.  It forces us to ask questions, perhaps, about how we should interact with the natural world and how nature and man can live alongside one another on such a densely populated continent, in a climate which humankind has perhaps changed forever.  This book probably isn’t here to provide an answer, but it’s a stern rebuke to an assumptive and patrician culture, which has perhaps brought us to this point.