Drive your plow over the bones of the dead

 

Blake, Proverbs of Hell

Here is a remarkable novel, by Olga Tokarczuk. Part murder mystery, part description of life in a remote Polish village near the Czech border, it defies your comfortable assumptions and keeps you guessing until the end. But it's not just about who did it. 

The title, and quotations at the start of each chapter, are from Blake, and this is one of several strands artfully pulled together by the novelist to create a very satisfying combination: a good narrative (you want to know what happens next), a remarkable narrator, and a cast of oddballs. This is one of those novels where everyone is slightly strange, none more so than the narrator herself. The narrator, an elderly woman, is keen on astrology and animal rights, as well as having a very idiosyncratic and opinionated view on most things: for example, she dreams up nicknames for each of the other characters (“Big Foot”, “Good News”, “Oddball”). As a reader, you are unsure of her pronouncements, which are a combination of well-argued and totally wacky; sometimes both at the same time. The strange, tense atmosphere of the book is reflected in the use of capital letters for many, but not all, of the nouns, reflecting what is presumably the narrator’s odd sense of priorities in the original Polish. As the narrator points out with delight, single old women are not noticed any more in literature than they are in real life, which is justification alone for reading the book.

The narrator is a passionate defender of animal rights, and she is always ready to have confrontations with hunters in the nearby woods. Yet after reading the novel, you are struck by the justice of many of her statements. Quite by accident, I notice a glowing review in the TLS of two memoirs by gamekeepers, with such choice (and seemingly unironic) statements as:

At the heart of these two gamekeepers' memoirs lies a paradox: loving animals can lead to a life that involves killing surprisingly large numbers of them ... When, in her first work placement as a gamekeeper, she [Portia Simpson] shoots her first stag, ambivalence gives way to relief and pleasure at a job well done.

Maren Meinhardt, TLS, 19 May 2018

Fact stranger than fiction. The strange mixture of sense and nonsense by the narrator is matched on many other topics as well, where she is equally  opinionated and, frankly, nutty. For example, she views describes the nearby Czech Republic as a kind of idyllic paradise compared to her Polish village. Her references to astrology are believable (we believe such a potty old woman would think such things) but an indictment of her judgement. Her response to moments of major trauma is disconcerting, to say the least. 

When you have completed the book, I think you get an idea of the link between William Blake and the narrator. She could be Blake himself, with all his weird system-building combined with memorable phrasing; a Blake reappearing in the 21st century.