Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Jennifer Croft

Winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.

A very 00s, pre-recessionary book. I daresay that's part of the reason for its recent success in the world of English-translated literary prizes. It must be a break from current political stresses for many judges and readers, evoking a liberal prelapsarian time when it never occurred to middle-class frequent travellers with an internationalist outlook that not everyone aspired to or admired their way of life - and when there weren't the grinding financial worries that would emerge for so many in the Global North shortly after its 2007 publication. A time when it didn't seem entirely silly to say: "Soon we may well say that it’s the cities that supplement the airports, as workplaces and places to sleep." In this book from over ten years ago. it is still possible to feel that, when travelling, one is off the radar, inbetween real life and real places: there isn't the always-on wifi and the expectation of being in touch 24/7. Its contemporary elements include, subtly or overtly the travel subculture and its attitudes, things like They weren’t real travellers: they left in order to return. - although unlike many of the travel culture's real-life proponents, Tokarczuk does occasionally mention the environmental impact of flying.

Many of Flights' characters evoke British political writer David Goodhart's frequently cited concept of "anywheres" versus "somewheres" (an explanation for Brexit and similar political shifts). This book is all about "anywheres":
Mostly wealthy tourists, Americans, Germans, Brits, and also those who had lost – in the free flow of money, which they let guide them – any and all defining traits. They were simply attractive, healthy, moving with unsummoned ease from language to language.
In the book's take on 'travel psychology', there are three progressive phases of psychological development in the traveller growing used to waking up away from home - starting with the assumption that one is at home, through the bewilderment at 'I don't know where I am' - to the enlightened ‘It Doesn’t Matter Where I Am,’ it makes no difference. I’m here..

I was fortunate to read Flights late in the year - not in the spring at the time of the Booker International list - and thanks to earlier GR reviewers went into it forewarned about inaccuracies, both those that are strongly contradicted by personal experience, such as the alleged absence of the over-40s from tourist hostels, and errors of factual knowledge across domains including physics, neurology and history. This meant that I always read any unfamiliar, apparently-factual material with some scepticism. I looked up things at times to check, but was not always sufficiently invested in the book to do so thoroughly. (There are stories and passages in Flights which are too much like bog-standard English-language litfic about middle-class families. As one of those readers who likes translated fiction to introduce a little strangeness to English and to fiction, and who reads it to get away from that sort of mundane contemporary British or American novel, this was not my sort of thing. [Have been trying to remember where I got that 'strangeness' from - thought it was a Tim Parks article but searching suggests not.] Although I enjoyed Flights to an extent that would merit 4 stars, the factual errors mean it gets no more than 3. Its reach is polymathic, but it stands up poorly against major 'encyclopaedic' novels that contain significantly fewer mistakes (although it's rare one of these books is found to have none, once let loose for a few years on a reading public with specialist degrees in many subjects. Paid reviewers in the press ought to have the job of thoroughly checking such material in novels they cover, but sadly this doesn't seem to be done.) It is disappointing, too, when there are readers who seek encyclopaedic novels by erudite women, not to be able to recommend this one more strongly due to the number of mistakes. If the 'factual' material were coming from a character's stream of consciousness, it could be fitting (although the errors should really be indicated in some way for the benefit of readers who wouldn't know or check) as there is a Jungian / 'woo' inflection to the book at times, and sometimes a chatty, vague style, which would sit well with half-remembered impressions of facts read years ago.

Tokarczuk has described Flights as a 'constellation novel', probably a new term in English, although the novel of fragments or volume of linked short stories is not a new form. If you enjoy noticing when apparently unrelated books you've read recently mention the same obscure fact, event or motif, you will likely get some fun out of Flights. Its ostensibly separate stories and passages - a mixture of apparently semi-autobiographical anecdotes, contemporary and historical fiction, jottings and epiphanies - are pulled together by similar minor connections. It's inevitably linear on the page (and it would be intriguing to hear how Tokarczuk decided the order for the pieces), but in ideaspace it has the shape of a 3D network diagram, with links between multiple nodes. On a small scale it is like an internet, although the web is only a minor feature in Flights. (An early internet /hypertext novel, 253 by Geoff Ryman (1998) - which I enjoyed more than most people on GR - also took the theme of travel, specifically a London Tube journey and its passengers: the loose structure and sense of movement associated with travel evidently suits these unconventional formats.)

The most apparently impressive connection made in the book is perhaps fictional: that an Italian soprano who sung at Chopin's funeral (his heart having already been removed to be taken to Poland) was also in Vienna during the 1848 revolution in which Angelo Soliman's body, stuffed for display without his consent, was destroyed. I can find nothing about 'Graziella Panini' outside references to Tokarczuk's book - though if someone reading this post has a biography of Chopin which goes into detail about his funeral, they may be able to check if she was mentioned. This string of events is connected to the book's other major theme, anatomy. It is not one I enjoy or find pleasant - but Flights did at least, unlike any other work previously, prompt me to think more rationally about why that might be, when I agree with people knowing and learning it as a topic, and also about its importance in the history of medicine - even if it is not in anatomy but in physiology where advances are still obviously required to understand medical phenomena.

There is some that tinge of exoticisation / orientalism, here of various Asian and North African settings, which is quite common in East European literature (e.g. Cărtărescu, Krasznahorkai) and less examined than it would be in British or North American literary fiction of the same vintage - part of a culture in which this is not discussed and flagged up to the same extent, and where these writers are already notably more liberal than average for their countries.

I once planned to read Tokarczuk's books in English in chronological order. And so far I've read two of them in reverse chronological order - which provided the unexpected fun of spotting motifs from Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009) emerging in Flights two years earlier. There is the 'invisbility' and anonymity of older women: For example, if something crazy were to happen, nobody on the scene would even remember her having been there, or if they did all they’d say would be, ‘some woman’, or ‘somebody else was over there…’; vegetarianism and environmental issues (although Tokarczuk is a member of the Polish Green Party, so these may be perennial in her books); canine [wolf] headed persons reported by early travel writers; and most copiously, an unconventional detective story.

The detective story was the main element that motivated me to keep going enthusiastically through the book; anticipating a resolution near the end (having looked at chapter titles) sustained my interest and goodwill towards the rest of the narrative. And then there wasn't one! This is actually flagged up in Flights' UK blurb, but I hadn't read it properly. It meant that, although these days, in Kunicki's shoes I probably would have let the absence go, assuming a decent store of prior trust and goodwill, I found myself empathising with his frustration and nagging, because I'd read about ¾ of the bloody book waiting for this information too. I was fed up with the narrative for the next several chapters but was eventually back on board after some apposite lines quoted near the beginning of this post.

Whilst it's necessary to have some alertness to notice the connections between stories or vignettes in Flights, most of the pieces of writing are not as intellectually dense as I'd assumed from others' reviews of the book. Some GR posters have said Drive Your Plow is an easier book than Flights, but I would say it is a similar level of difficulty, wearing its learning more lightly but with plenty to uncover for those who've read relevant material (one GR friend pointed out connections to Derrida, which I never would have noticed). Plow is more focused and tightly constructed, and better for it IMO. Flights, like the later book, has paragraphs of intense observation and philosophical musings, although here, there are more of them, and their failure / fancifulness rate is higher. Similarly, there are passages of gorgeous description in Flights - the chapter on plastic bags, described as if they were a species, is outstanding and perversely beautiful - but also some which are a little flat compared with those in the shorter novel. I still find Olga Tokarczuk very likeable: I just wish this book had had more editing, especially fact checking when it was first published. (Factual errors are generally not altered for translation, especially not in fiction.)

(Read Nov-Dec 2018, reviewed Dec 2018. The review and discussion thread on Goodreads.)

Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones

UK cover. Image from the website of publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Review revised March 2019, after Drive Your Plow was longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.

Celebrated and controversial Polish author Olga Tokarczuk won the Man Booker International Prize in May 2018 for Flights. Drive Your Plow, published in English that September, was the next volume of Tokarczuk's to be released in Britain by Fitzcarraldo Editions. It was first published in Poland in 2009.

It's a literary crime novel, narrated by Janina Duszejko, an eccentric animal-lover in her sixties, who lives alone in a remote village near the Czech border, and it has been described as an ecological thriller with feminist themes. (She hates her name and tries to avoid using it, so I have said "the narrator" and "the protagonist" more often than I usually would in this post.)

I hadn't read any of Tokarczuk's books before autumn 2018, although I'd owned copies of Primeval and House of Day, House of Night for years before that without getting round to reading them - missing out on the hipster opportunity to say I'd read her before she was famous (famous in Britain that is).

I found this a tricky review to write. The novel's protagonist has strong negative views about Christianity. I'm active in a Goodreads discussion group where a handful of the other frequent posters are practising Christians (I'm not), and some of them didn't like Drive Your Plow. I wanted to find a way to stay true to my own views whilst also being diplomatic about religion. In the preceding weeks and months there had been heated discussions (totally unrelated to religion) about some English-language Booker listed titles, and I wanted to continue smoothing things over, not spark a new bout of partisanship over another book. Months later, after talking about it, it turns out that their dislike of the book isn't directly connected with that, as conservative Polish Catholicism is quite different from their churches. But the background reading was still worthwhile, as I'd found it interesting to read about environmental activism by various Christian groups, some of which are mentioned later in the post.

This review does not contain overt spoilers, but does hint at plot developments and twists, in order to discuss whole the novel.

Drive Your Plow has been described as one of Olga Tokarczuk's lighter novels, written between the experimental Flights and The Books of Jacob (as she said in this interview) - but it's still full of ideas.

Some things were easy to say about the book.

It has gorgeous descriptions of nature.

In this it's similar to the writing of Andrzej Stasiuk, another major contemporary Polish author who, like Olga Tokarczuk, left Warsaw to move to the Tatra mountain border regions. (Although Tokarczuk was born near the area where she now lives.) Both writers incorporate the rural landscape and the culture of the border area into their work. If you are an English-language reader with heritage in the hills of southern of Poland, you are rather spoilt for choice - it's not often that there is such an abundance of translated writing from such sparsely populated areas far from major cities.

Silesian countryside, on the poster for Agnieska Holland's 2017 film adaptation of Drive Your Plow (English title Spoor). Image from radiozet.pl.

Parts of Drive Your Plow contain intensely reflective and philosophical insights. Especially near the beginning, there's a paragraph worth highlighting and remembering on every page. These hint at why Tokarczuk's longer and more complex novel Flights won this year's International Booker, and why The Books of Jacob has been so eagerly awaited by English readers of complex fiction.

Some of the novel, especially after the early chapters, is more of a pacy literary-crime story, and less overtly philosophical. Which makes it a faster, lighter read overall than it may seem from the opening pages - however this may disappoint readers hoping for something more structurally experimental all the way through.

I'm grateful to Katia's review on Goodreads, which I read before the novel itself: it was invaluable in explaining that the narrator of Drive Your Plow is a riff on a 1990s East European trend for light, ironic novels featuring female detectives. I couldn't help but see this through the lens of the English cosy-mystery subgenre, as descended from Miss Marple - but undoubtedly there are differences in the Polish equivalent which an English reader is unaware of. (The queen of 20th century Polish crime writing, the late Joanna Chmielewska, has not been translated to English as yet.) Seeing Drive Your Plow as a satire on old-lady cosy-mysteries made me look forward to reading it - it seemed like an easy way into Tokarczuk's work, more so than Flights, which had been talked up as formidable, or the two other books of hers which I'd already owned for years, and which had become "ought to reads" at least as much as "want to reads".

And, as it turned out, I loved what Tokarczuk added to the cosy-mystery concept: twists, politics, and amplification of traits that popular culture associates with older women living alone but which it does not necessarily respect - including a 'mad cat lady' love of all animals, not just cats, (Pani Duszejko is actually a dog-owner) and a belief in superstitions and the supernatural. The narrator is not as safe and sweet as your typical cosy-mystery heroine. (There is also another feminist twist on crime fiction in general: in Drive Your Plow, the murder victims are middle-aged and older men - not the usual young women or children.)

Pani Duszejko (played by Agnieszka Mandat) at a town noticeboard. Image from theplaylist.net.

In literary fiction, making astrology prominent in a narrative can get people's backs up, as it did with Eleanor Catton's 2013 Booker Winner The Luminaries. I mean, this isn't romance or commercial women's fiction, is it? On a personal level, I find horoscopes pernicious - they can be an insidious nuisance when combined with a phase of OCD-type issues. But when they are used as complex motifs in a literary novel, I think the snobbery they provoke is excessive. (Some have described this snobbery as sexist, although perhaps it is also sexist to align astrology so strongly with women.) I doubt that heavy use of, for example, Renaissance alchemy and its symbolism, in a work of fiction would irritate the same people to the same extent. Astrology is, similarly, a system of symbols and interactions - one well known in current pop culture. It has a place in fiction just like other features of pop culture disliked by some readers of 'serious' novels. I daresay Olga Tokarczuk thought about all this - as well as hardline Polish Catholic clergy's dislike of astrology - when she decided to put it in Drive Your Plow - although she wouldn't have known that the novel would be translated to English at a time when astrology is gaining in popularity among younger people.

The narrator seemed so similar (although not, I hasten to add, in her most extreme actions) to a couple of women whose posts I'd read years ago in pet forums, that I wondered if the translator had read the same forums and taken inspiration from the writing style of these people. She shares other characteristics with them beyond narrative voice: a level of intelligence and expertise in her chosen interests which a lot of people wouldn't think a "mad cat lady" type would have; and anger and hardcore views about animal rights more usually associated with recently-converted young vegans. It turns out that a linguistic similarity, the capitalisation of certain nouns, such as Animals, was present in the original Polish novel (thank you, Goodreads Agnieszka for the info). Later in the book, extended English prose quotations from William Blake (the narrator's favourite author, of whom she makes unpublished Polish translations as a hobby) indicated that he was actually the inspiration behind her capitalisations. He was writing at a time when this capitalisation was more accepted, and not necessarily an indicator of personal eccentricity, corporate brand-speak, or of a story for children, as it is now. [Since reading Drive Your Plow, and this review, I've also read Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), in the Penguin edition that preserves the original capitalisation, and where it is used for every Noun. Blake, writing decades later, was more selective about his use of caps.]


For all its positives, I also thought the book might be shooting itself in the foot while trying to do too many clever things in one go. The plot twist seemed to undermine the novel's causes: greater respect for women like the protagonist, for environmental and animal rights activism and opposition to conservative Catholicism.

This comes to an aspect of the book that I found tricky to write about; I revised draft reviews more than once in the hope of being both true to my own views, and more diplomatic about religion. In the end, the latter became easier. I realised that whilst, historically, the Christian doctrine of man's dominion over the animals can be seen as background to the current environmental situation, the exploitation of nature is nowadays criticised by some prominent clergy. Although this varies greatly by country and denomination, in general there are practices various branches of Christianity used to support, and which they no longer condone. Sweeping judgements about the entire religion are one of the ways in which the narrator goes too far. (Although to an anticlerical Pole reading Plow when it was first published ten years ago - and anticlericalism has a long tradition in Polish intellectual life* - these views may not have sounded unfairly sweeping. Many of these ecologically-minded Christian developments happened since the book's first publication, and in other countries. Traditional Polish Catholicism was, and is, very different church from the 2000s Church of England, with its fair-trade craft fairs; Anglicanism is a denomination for which it has been no great leap to speak out about the environment.)

Drive Your Plow is ambiguous about what is heroism and what is villainy. In this it has similarities to the Channel 4 series Utopia (with its plot relating to human overpopulation). By showing a character whom most would consider to be going too far, it prompts its audience, or at any rate those who agree that there is an underlying issue, to consider where they think lines should be drawn, and what might be done in the real world. I felt that Drive Your Plow, through its ambiguous narrative tone, has potential to appeal to readers who disagree with the narrator's views on animal rights as well as those broadly sympathetic to them - although in practice I am not sure if that has been borne out.

One could say that Tokarczuk was using the novel's ambiguity to protect herself given the far greater conservatism on animal rights issues in Poland, as compared with Britain. But in Poland the novel was not received as ambiguous. It apparently led to new debate about hunting, according to an interview with Tokarczuk earlier in 2018:
Hunting has become a hot political issue in Poland since the novel was published, but at the time few were thinking about it. “Some people said that once again Tokarczuk is an old crazy woman doing weird things, but then this big discussion started on the internet about what we can do about this very patriarchal, Catholic tradition.” (Thank you to Neil's review for prompting me to look at this interview.)

The pro-hunting clerical tradition represented by the priest in Drive Your Plow remains alive and well in Poland, and was influencing political policy seven years after the book's publication, in favour of logging at the once-revered ancient Białowieża Forest:

Sections of the Catholic and Orthodox churches have played a partisan role in the debate, with a passage from Genesis - “be fruitful, and multiply, replenish the earth and subdue it” - often used to justify increased logging.
One orthodox priest from Hajnówka, Leonid Szeszko, recently called for scientific, environmental and NGOs which opposed the logging plans to be banned.
Szyszko, who has championed the logging law, is a regular guest on the ultra-conservative Radio Maria, a Catholic radio station, and appears at conferences with a priest garbed in a forester’s green uniform.

Even if one reads with awareness of this, the prevailing attitudes detailed in the book seem old-fashioned and sometimes downright strange from a British perspective. I doubt it would be generally considered extreme or weird to make meticulous reports about infractions of hunting byelaws in the UK, even if some locals in some areas might not be receptive. And in UK cities it is pretty common to be vegetarian, like the narrator, or vegan. Fur-farming (another sub-plot in Drive Your Plow) has been illegal in Britain for about 15 years now, and was already in decline before that. It was quite eye-opening to see how differently these things were evidently regarded by the majority in Poland. The hunt chaplain's sermon seemed almost medieval.

Nor, in contemporary Britain, would the established church be considered the primary upholder of 'man's dominion over the animals', as the Polish Catholic Church is in Drive Your Plow. The CofE is both less influential, and rather different in its prevailing politics. I wrote in a draft a couple of weeks before posting this review that it was inconceivable that former Archbishop of Canterbury and "national treasure" Rowan Williams, would utter anything like Father Rustle's sermon. Then, emphasising this, in the intervening fortnight, Williams spoke out in support of Extinction Rebellion, a new protest movement calling for more government action on climate change.

It wouldn't be correct, either, to take the book's view of the Polish Catholic church as globally characteristic of Catholicism, even if conservative Catholicism is influential in some countries. (Semantically, being against nature conservation always seems a very poor use of the word 'conservative'.) Famously, there was Pope Francis' 2015 encyclical Laudato si' - a follow-up to Polish Pope John Paul II's 1990 message 'The Ecological Crisis'. There are also smaller initiatives including a number of orders of nuns making active efforts to live sustainably.

In Plow, the conservative Catholicism of Father Rustle and the hunters needs to be set against the narrator as a folkloric/pagan symbol herself. While reading the novel, I had passing thoughts of the crone aspect of the Celtic neopagan triple goddess, but this was a Polish book so it didn't seem terribly relevant, and I left it alone. But Mimi's excellent review on Goodreads points out, among other things, that Janina is a Jungian crone, and also makes a highly plausible connection with Baba Yaga. (I was kicking myself for not having thought of Baba Yaga.) Thus the narrator could also be connected tentatively with Slavic neopaganism, a small movement which tends to be more openly critical of Christianity than is contemporary Western paganism.

(Incidentally, this is the first time since veganism became a major social trend that I've encountered a novel with a narrator who might be on the wavelength of hardcore vegans - i.e. the people who post confrontationally under Guardian cookery articles about meat, or who actively campaign. Actually, have I *ever*? There is surprisingly little about vegetarianism and veganism in novels, considering how common they are among urban creative people in the global North. Anyway, it would be interesting to hear what young vegans who were into astrology thought of Drive Your Plow: the narrator is more in tune with their views than most fictional characters of her age - but is her ambiguity too discomfiting?)

In yet another (!) of her interviews for The Guardian during 2018, Olga Tokarczuk mentioned that Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet was one of her favourite books, and an influence on Drive Your Plow. I read it not long before Plow - I'd been thinking of reading The Hearing Trumpet for years, and here was a good reason. The parallels between the two books are more evident now (a month after finishing Plow) than they did in close-up, while I was reading Tokarczuk's book. Transparently, both are about older female protagonists who are not taken seriously by many of the other characters - but they are centred and respected by their respective first-person narratives. They are not the kind of unreliable narrators that seem crafted to show up and trip up the protagonists, even if it is evident that the other characters don't see them as they see themselves. Both books are somewhat ambiguous and/or potentially shooting themselves in the foot: they kind of celebrate their heroines as interesting women who don't follow societal norms and who should be listened to more, alongside indicating why many people, even sympathetic people, might disregard their views to some extent. (Tokarczuk has also used ambiguity, or rather tact and subtlety in the allusive matter of the narrator's ailments.)

But this ambiguity is also what makes these books *art* rather than merely socio-political arguments and campaigns. They don't provide the easy arguments one might like them to. As in The Hearing Trumpet, people with dementia may be imagining fascinating worlds inside their heads and they deserve to live in a friendly environment that meets their needs and to be taken seriously … but the dementia can also make it difficult to keep them anchored in the real world and to be sure what they say is real. Old ladies obsessed with animals may be intelligent people who've had interesting, repsonsible jobs, and be driven campaigners … but they might go too far (and occasionally, in more serious ways than in writing endless complaint letters in the proverbial green ink).

I was impressed by the first Olga Tokarczuk book I read - though given that Plow is one of her lighter efforts, and still contained so much, it did not make me much less daunted by the prospect of reading Flights, which had been steadily sweeping 2018's translation shortlists before it.

*e.g. Czesław Miłosz, History of Polish Literature, p.xiv, "a curious dichotomy ... a more or less permanent trait of Polish letters; namely an emotional moralism obviously nourished by a strong residue of Christian ethics has coexisted with anti-clericalism and an utter skepticism as to any dogmas (religious or political)".


(Book read Sept-Oct 2018; reviewed Nov 2018. Revised March 2019 - mostly for clarity and style, and also to add points about Polish anticlericalism and Janina as crone, which emerged from discussion in Goodreads comments. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)