Man Booker

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

| ruthpelletier

By Olga Tokarczuk

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

“The fact that we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future is a terrible mistake in the programming of the world. It should be fixed at the first opportunity.” (p. 271)

There is a tricky kind of novel, rare and hard to pull off: the Novel of Dubious Guilt, First Person. ‘The Turn of the Screw‘ is this kind of novel; ‘Gone Girl‘ is this kind of novel; ‘His Bloody Project‘ is this kind of novel.

In novels of this kind, a protagonist, speaking directly to the reader, relates a series of events in which they are implicated without revealing the extent of their involvement. Usually, but not always, it is a murder. The trick of it is: the reader must not be able to discern whether or not their narrator is guilty or innocent. They must not be able to trust the narrative, even as they invest in it by reading further. They must keep always before them the possibility either that the narrator is lying, or that the narrator is mad.

It’s hard to pull this off. If you make a narrator too cagey, if they act suspicious to their reader, their guilt will become apparent. But too much information, or obvious psychosis, also destroys the ambiguity, and once a reader has “figured out” what really happened, the effect is ruined.

Shame on me, I had never heard of Olga Tokarczuk. This really isn’t forgivable – one of her previous novels, ‘Flights‘, won the Man Booker International Prize, and she herself won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018. But I had never heard of her: I picked up ‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead‘ solely because I found the title irresistible, and I have a sneaking suspicion that it is going to end up being the best book I read this year.

Janina Duszejko lives in rural Poland, near the Czech border. She is a teacher, an aging astrology enthusiast, an intense lover of animals. She has only a few friends, but she is known in her community: she cares for the summer dachas of the city people during the hard winters, and she has frequent confrontations with the local hunters. In her free time, she and her friend Dizzy translate Blake into Polish; she pores over the star charts of everyone she meets, a side project she has to prove her theory that the moment of a person’s birth contains, complete and unchangeable, the moment of their death. She had two dogs, her little girls, but they went missing the year before and she has never been able to find them.

One night in the middle of the winter, her neighbor Oddball comes to her house in the middle of the night to tell her that their mutual neighbor Bigfoot has died. He has choked on a bone from a deer that he poached, a habit for which Janina loathes him. As Oddball and Janina make the body decent for the police, Janina looks for Bigfoot’s papers – she wants to know his birthday, to draw his chart and add his death to her charts. She finds a photograph which shocks her; she does not tell us what is in it, but it sparks a series of events which leads to the deaths of four more men.

Over the next year, prominent men in the community begin to die in suspicious circumstances. The commandant of police falls down a well. A priest burns down in his own church. A fur farmer is found in an animal trap. The only thing that the men have in common: they were all hunters. Deer tracks are found near one body – fox tracks near another. Rumors begin to swirl around the community: the animals are taking their revenge.

Janina is a spectacular narrator: smart and observant and sad and sly and barking mad all at the same time. Tokarczuk, even in translation, is a beautiful writer, and this is prose like I’ve never quite encountered before. It’s a blend of real weirdness, humor, loneliness and wile. It’s pathos and bathos and rage.

“Spring is just a short interlude, after which the mighty armies of death advance; they’re already besieging the city walls. We live in a state of siege. If one takes a close look at each fragment of a moment, one might choke with terror. Within our bodies disintegration inexorably advances; soon we shall fall sick and die. Our loved ones will leave us, the memory of them will dissolve them in the tumult; nothing will remain. Just a few clothes in the wardrobe and someone in a photograph, no longer recognized. The most precious memories will dissipate. Everything will sink into darkness and vanish.” (p. 124)

Janina’s focus, her obsession, is animals. She has made what appears to be a small imaginative leap, but one which makes a permanent, wrathful outsider of her: she believes that animals are the moral equals of people. That they have souls, intelligences, if not identical to ours, like enough to warrant protections equal to the ones we offer each other. She views humans who kill, cage, or eat animals with the same revulsion you would feel for an unrepentant murderer. To a cannibal.

Olga Tokarczuk

“So I spoke, using wise words…

“”You’ll say it’s just one Boar,” I continued. “But what about the deluge of butchered meat that falls on our cities day by day like never-ending, apocalyptic rain? This rain heralds slaughter, disease, collective madness, the obfuscation and contamination of the Mind. For no human heart is capable of bearing so much pain. The whole, complex human psyche has evolved to prevent Man from understanding what he is really seeing. To stop the truth from reaching him by wrapping it in illusion, in idle chatter. The world is a prison of suffering, so constructed that in order to survive one must inflict pain on others…What sort of world is this? Someone’s body is made into shoes, into meatballs, sausages, a bedside rug, someone’s bones are boiled to make broth…Shoes, sofas, a shoulder bag made of someone’s belly, keeping warm with someone else’s fur, eating someone’s body, cutting it into bits and frying it in oil…Can it really be true? Is this nightmare really happening? This mass killing, cruel, impassive, automatic, without any pangs of conscience, without the slightest pause for thought, though plenty of thought is applied to ingenious philosophies and theologies. What sort of world is this, where killing and pain are the norm?” (p. 107)

Because Janina is so single-minded, ‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead‘ isn’t a true mystery. By the “reveal”, you have a pretty good sense of what’s going on, but, at that point, you’ve come far enough with Janina that you are thoroughly on her side.

The trick of those mystery narrators, those Did-I-Or-Didn’t-I novels, is how do you sympathize with narrator who might be a murderer? ‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead‘ is a neat twist on this: how do you sympathize with a narrator when you are both murderers, she in your eyes, you in hers? Can the charm of her prose, the righteousness of her cause, the clarity of her vision, bring you along with her, make you a kind of accomplice?

The answer is yes, emphatically yes. Janina is as winning a narrator as I have encountered in years; ‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead‘ is a great love. A book this good, the first thing I do is buy something else by the author. ‘Flights‘ won Tokarczuk a Man Booker – I’ll start with that. Books this good are rare – when you find them, follow them.

The Cromwell Trilogy

| ruthpelletier

Wolf Hall; Bring Up the Bodies; The Mirror and the Light

By Hilary Mantel

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Most of the time, when we say that we love a book, we mean that we love the literary work as a whole. We love the book: the plot, the characters, the prose, the descriptions and pacing, the resolution, the lessons, the intersection of the book and our selves and our lives.

But sometimes, when we say we love a book, what we really mean is: I love the character that animates this book. It isn’t that we don’t like or appreciate the other stuff; it’s that that stuff is really just the medium through which the character is communicated to us. Sometimes the love of a book is really a love affair with a character.

The first of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, ‘Wolf Hall‘, came out in 2009. Its critical reception was ecstatic: it won the Man Booker (as did its sequel, ‘Bring Up the Bodies‘, the only pair of novel and sequel to have ever done so) and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Guardian named it the best book of the 21st century.

I read it when it came out, and found it exactly as flabbergastingly excellent as everyone else. It is rare that a book lives up to the hype, right? The problem with books that unite critics in rapturous consensus is that, while you may love them when you finally get around to reading them, it’s almost impossible for them to take you by surprise. You approach them, necessarily, waiting for them to justify themselves; you read them in a state of constant anticipation, on the lookout for excellence.

‘Wolf Hall‘ did surprise me, though.

The protagonist of the Cromwell trilogy is Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex, the man who served as chief minister to Henry the VIII for eight years until he was executed on orders from his king in 1540.

What is clear from these novels is that Hilary Mantel loves Thomas Cromwell, and, because she loves him so much and because she is such a good writer, the result is that I love him just as deeply. A reading of the Cromwell trilogy becomes, therefore, an experience of profound love, not of books, but of a man: the love of the author for subject, communicated to her readers.

I suspect that I am not the only reader for whom this attachment to the fictionalized person of Thomas Cromwell was the salient experience of reading the ‘Wolf Hall‘ novels. Mantel’s Cromwell (I am, at this point, totally unable to disambiguate her character from the “real”, historical man) is one of the most persuasive characters I’ve ever encountered in literature. He is measured, sardonic, wise. Humane, possessed of a capacious memory and an eye for detail. He’s brave, sentimental, effective, and ruthless. He is so lovable that Mantel’s readers may easily fail to notice that he has become, over the course of her books, a monster.

Cromwell, by Holbein

After a brief glimpse into his childhood, the Cromwell trilogy introduces us to Thomas during his employment for Cardinal Wolsey, who was, at the time, first advisor to Henry VIII. The reader’s first real impression of him is his love for this man, the Cardinal, his admiration and loyalty.

Wolsey fell from grace when he was unable to secure a divorce for Henry from his first wife, Katherine of Aragon. Cromwell manages to secure this divorce, and further secures the crown for Anne Boleyn, thus earning himself a place in Henry’s confidence. These novels are about that relationship: between Cromwell and his king, the obsession, the love and the fear, the minute study a subject makes of his ruler.

I will never be able to explain why I have loved Mantel’s Cromwell so deeply. I can only say that I loved him from the first chapters of ‘Wolf Hall‘: his immovability, his wit, his clarity about everyone except himself.

Mantel is a great writer, really magnificent. Her prose is plain, sometimes almost like a sermon, but she shows, doesn’t tell. The only person who tells is Cromwell, and he tells beautifully. That’s why, perhaps, when the books are through, it is Cromwell you love, and not Mantel. This is maybe the surest sign of her achievement: you, as reader, can’t help but confuse her grace for her protagonist’s.

But the fact that Mantel shows and doesn’t tell means that some of the most important emotional developments of the book happen slowly, subtly, and might be missed: there is no announcement, no climax.

Cromwell was a Protestant, a sincere follower (according to Mantel) of Luther and Tyndale. One of the animating relationships of the book is the one between him and Sir Thomas More. More, who, in real life, was a complete fuckhead, is a complete fuckhead in ‘Wolf Hall‘ as well: a Catholic zealot, a one-man English Inquisition, he spends most of the book burning Protestants.

More and Cromwell are respectful enemies: both are men of the law and of the Holy Book, but one requires that the book be written in Latin, the other longs for it to be written in English. Cromwell, like Mantel’s readers, deplores More’s methods: the torture, the burning of heretics. So right is his opposition to Thomas More that readers will continue to feel themselves on his side, to find him persuasive, when he himself begins to have people executed (indeed, burned) for papacy, under the charge of treason.

I think that Mantel does this on purpose, because I believe, I really, really believe, that she loves Thomas Cromwell, and that she has endeavored to make us love him. And just as his love for his king requires a certain, side-eyed blindness to his foolishnesses and weaknesses, just as all love requires some blindness to fault, so our love for him will require blindness to his faults, apologies for them, sympathy with them.

Hilary Mantel

So we will notice that he has become a murderer, but we still fear for him as his enemies gather and gain momentum, and we will rage when they surround him and have him arrested, and we will grieve when he is executed, and the third book ends. And I know that I, personally, will never quite be able to forgive Henry VIII.

There is probably a more rigorous discussion to be had about the three individual books; I suspect that ‘Wolf Hall‘ is by far the best of the three, but I’m frankly unable to discern a difference, because it is the man that I love, not the books, and the man is in all three. As I mentioned above, I read ‘Wolf Hall’ when it came out, and then ‘Bring Up the Bodies‘ in its turn, but I reread both before picking up ‘The Mirror & the Light‘, read all three in one go, and I can no longer tell them apart; I can’t even remember now where one ends and the other begins.

But I know that he, Thomas, is dead now, in a way he was not, for me, last week. And in this way the Cromwell trilogy has been, truly, more of a relationship than a reading experience: I do not feel that I could go back again, read them from the beginning, start with him from his youth. He is dead, he died, I was there, and there is no going home again.

I am quite used to having relationships with books – relationships with people are more complicated. But they are, ultimately, richer, I think, the relationships with people. I don’t know whether how I feel about the Cromwell trilogy is richer than how I feel about books I have loved, but it is simpler: I just love its main character. That’s all. The language, the descriptions, the vivid imaginings, all contribute to my understanding of, relationship with, love of the man at its heart.