Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Natural Justice

Hypocrisy allows us to remain alive. Without it we would be forced to recognise the misery we endure and the misery we inflict. So we lie; we make evil, even if it’s necessary evil, into virtue. Untruthfulness is re-branded as ‘discretion.’ Exploitation becomes ‘providing employment.’ Nationalism hides behind a mask of religious faith. And environmental destruction is promoted as a divine right which human beings have an obligation to honour. As Mrs Janina Duszejko, Civil Engineer, English Teacher, Gnostic Astrologer, Committed Vegetarian, and translator of William Blake knows, “The whole, complex human psyche has evolved to prevent Man from understanding what he is really seeing.”

While not religious, Janina believes in cosmic order. She thinks birth, death, and the course of our lives are determined by our pre-conscious experience with the stars and the planets. Living through the long winters in the isolated mountains of Southwestern Poland have given her plenty of leisure to pursue these connections. The factual results of her research are clear: “every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.” Her conclusion is that of William Blake himself: “Anger puts things in order and shows you the world in a nutshell; Anger restores the gift of Clarity of Vision, which it’s hard to attain in any other state... Without a doubt Anger is the source of all wisdom, for Anger has the power to exceed any limits.”

Janina is angry and she dreams of revenge - mainly against the local hunting fraternity who have killed her two dogs and any number of wild creatures whom she has befriended or admired. She is unable to break through the wall of institutional hypocrisy that the hunters have erected to protect themselves. But despite the solidarity among the local gentry, the police, the state forestry people, and even the Church, the leading hunters are found successively dead over the course of a year. Janina blames the animals and writes the authorities repeatedly to inform them of her suspicions. She doesn’t want the animals punished but forgiven as a matter of justice, for it is obvious to her if to no one else that “the world was not created for Mankind.”

Only religious fanatics and other self-serving types could argue otherwise. Oh, wait, perhaps they’re righteously angry too. Is it only hypocrites who are hypocritical?

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