Polish Diary. "Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead" by Olga Tokarczuk.

It takes guts to write a detective story where the identity of the murderer is never in doubt. In the end, this is what elevates great art above mediocrity: the journey, not the destination. And the journey as presented by Olga Tokarczuk, the 2018 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature, is an oddly fascinating romp through Polish countryside.

While pigeonholing this book could be a thankless pursuit, I would say that Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead is a gothic detective story with elements of black humour. The novel is set in a remote Polish village on the border of Czech Republic (or Czechia, as they prefer to be called these days). An ageing woman, Janina Duszejko, discovers the body of her neighbour who happened, just happened, to have choked on the bone of a deer. This neighbour is a known poacher, and Ms Duszejko (because she hates it when they call her Janina) first entertains the idea that it may have been some sort of revenge on the part of animals. From there, the story unravels in ways that are both sinister and honestly quite funny. It certainly helps that Ms Duszejko is a character. She gets off on William Blake, love of animals, position of planets and disdain for conventional names (she calls her neighbours things like Oddball, Big Foot and Good News). Or and also - she wants to know the date of your birth.

Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead (a William Blake quote, one of many) is always more than just a detective novel. Quite simply, the depth of its main character is much too big for that. Ms Duszejko spends her days looking after the houses of her neighbours and she is also someone who 'loves crossing borders'. She is suffering from various Ailments and yet she says that 'being healthy is an insecure state'. She only watches weather channels and she firmly believes in the power of Anger ('sharpens your senses'). She values animals over humans and she has this interesting tendency to start certain words with capital letters (see above). You are on her side but you are also slightly creeped out by her ways. 

The story itself is drenched in folklore and astrology. The former provides one of the most genuinely chilling stories I have read in a while. The latter is dangerously engrossing and rarely tedious. Also, the book is filled with Tokarczuk's sharp observations filtered through Ms Duszejko's restless mind. For instance, she mentions that at some point all men become 'testosterone autists' who stop talking and just read books on the Second World War. Or else she writes a poignant passage about the treatment of elderly people and how at some point they get used to being brushed aside and disregarded, which, and this is the tragic part, no longer seems strange or disheartening.

Naturally, there is a strong detective element to it. It is central without being overwhelming. It hovers over the story and makes you think of the old cliché: it is not about where you get, it is about how you get there. The mystery is certainly intriguing, but you are just as invested in the actual world created by the author. Because the imagination is running wild over these 300 pages, and when Ms Duszejko describes the way Man fell to earth, it is both deranged and absolutely compelling. In the end, the question you are left with is this: who is there to say what is sanity and what constitutes madness?