A story told by a wizened woman with ailments, a sparsely populated mountain area in which animals may have more sway than the few people there realize, outsiders who arrive for help translating Blake and who study insect larvae, and questioning free will -- Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is all that and more.
The novel, by Man Booker International Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, has been translated into English from Polish, bringing to the New World a story from the Old World that feels like a forgotten fairy tale. Duszejka is a semi-retired older woman whose aches and pains can lay her up for days. She can no longer design bridges and oversee their construction. But she does teach young children English one day a week in the village down the mountain, keeps an eye on summer cabins during the winter and studies astrology because it helps demonstrates, in her view, that there is no such thing as free will.
The free will aspect of the novel is mentioned occasionally by Duszejka, who narrates the story. It is used more as what is brought out to the table when company comes over for tea, rather than the most common ingredient of everyday meals. Instead, the main course is the death of three local men. Their destinies are gnawed over like bones that have a bit of meat still on them. When Duszejka insists on calling and writing to local authorities to investigate what she believes is responsible for the deaths, it's like she's sucking the marrow out of these occurrences. Over time, some of the villagers start to see things her way.
But are they right? And, if they are, would that have changed things for those men or provide a way to change things in the future? Oh, there is that free will part again.
The novel begins with one of her two year-round neighbors coming over at night for help with the discovery that their other neighbor has died. Duszejka has named the dead neighbor Big Foot, and he was not a favorite of hers. They had come to words because he shut his dog up in a shed at night and its ceaseless barking had gotten the best of her. The surviving neighbor, Oddball, is a quiet and calm man. This naming habit is something that is important to our narrator -- there is another passage where she names people by the phrases they overuse, such as Mr. Apparently or Mrs. Generally. She also hates her own given name, Janina, and would just as soon not acknowledge it.
This naming of things extends to people. Early on, she notes:
As I gazed at the black-and-white landscape of the Plateau I realized that sorrow is an important word for defining the world. It lies at the foundations of everything, it is the fifth element, the quintessence.
In between her ramblings, her insistence of those nominally in charge doing what they are supposed to be doing and time traipsing around her corner of the world, Duszejka and a former student, a young man who loves poetry and translations but who is doing contract IT work for the police, translate Blake. At one point, they offer several translations of one stanza. To realize that what one is reading was originally English, with variations composed in Polish, and translated back into English again, is a tour de force in perspective and how the slightest change can render a new meaning.
The title of the novel is taken from Blake’s Proverbs of Hell, part of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Overlaying it all is the feeling that this is a fairy tale, newly discovered. At one point, Duszejka considers kidnapping the local government forester and locking him in the basement until he comes around to her way of thinking, either giving him nothing but bread and water or fattening him up and checking "every day by the thickness of a finger whether he was fit to be roasted yet". As she is a vegetarian, this is not something she would actually do. I think. But it is sad that the forester notes that "there is nothing natural about nature anymore," which does go to the heart of this novel.
Something that does strike at the heart of this novel is a celebration at the local church, which is consecrated to Saint Hubert. A saint who saved animals but who became the patron saint of hunters. A saint celebrated by people who love hunting, who love collecting trophies.
Whether it's investigating mysterious deaths, wanting to preserve the trees where beetles create nurseries for the next generation, or trying to see if one can have a say in one's own life, the ways of nature are central to the novel.