When Olga Tokarczuk published Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead in 2009 in her native Poland, she was accused of inciting eco-terrorism – remarkable for any novel, let alone the tale of a 60-something English teacher recounting a string of murders in her village. All the victims are hunters, and Mrs Duszejko insists the local animals are enacting summary justice; unsurprisingly, most of the village thinks she’s mad.
But Tokarczuk’s book is radical. It proposes a way of thinking about animals that, when taken to its logical conclusion, explodes the world as we know it. It’s transgressive in more subtle ways, too. Mrs Duszejko is the kind of protagonist we rarely see: a 60-something woman who is smart, rebellious, eccentric, angry – and effective.
