Category: books

Only a piece of machinery could possibly carry all the world’s pain. Only a machine, simple, effective and just. But if everything were to happen mechanically, our prayers wouldn’t be needed. (p. 49)

Well, this is a strange and endearing book. It reads, in part, almost like a fairy tale where macabre goings-on are carried out by the forest folk.

It is the elderly Janina Duszejko’s opinion that animals are committing the murders which have occurred on the Plateau where she lives in one of three cottages. As the novel begins, she is pulled awake in the middle of the night by her neighbor, Oddball, who takes her over to Big Foot’s house where the later has been discovered dead. He has a freshly killed Deer head on the table and a small bone on which he choked to death in his mouth. “One Creature had devoured another, in the silence and stillness of the Night.” (p. 26)

As Janina searches for Big Foot’s identity card, on the sideboard and in the drawers, she comes across a wad of photographs, one of which utterly shocks her.

I looked at it more closely, and was about to lay it aside. It took me a while to understand what I was looking at. Suddenly, total silence fell, and I found myself right in the middle of it. I stared at the picture. My body tensed, I was ready to do battle. My head began to spin, and a dismal wailing rose in my years, a roar, as if from over the horizon an army of thousands was approaching – voices, the clank of iron, the creak of wheels in the distance. Anger makes the mind clear and incisive, able to see more. It sweeps up the other emotions and takes control of the body. Without a doubt Anger is the source of all wisdom, for Anger has the power to exceed any limits. (p. 27)

The names of things and emotions are capitalized in this novel. The Animals. The Deer. The Little Girls, Tools, or even Hypothesis. It casts a disconcerting importance on parts of the English language, making it almost other worldly. It mimics, perhaps, William Blake’s style from which her title comes:

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.” (William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

And yet, what Olga Tokarczuk says about the animals, I, too, hold very much to be true. “Animals have a very strong sense of justice,” she writes. (p. 202) They certainly seem more capable of understanding the nature of things than we human Beings.

You know what, sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves…And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other. (p. 223)

There’s also a stony precipice nearby, but anyone who thinks it’s a natural feature would be mistaken, for it’s the remains of an old quarry, which used to take bites out of the Plateau and would surely have consumed the whole thing eventually in the avid mouths of its diggers. They say there are plans to start it up again, at which point we shall vanish from the face of the Earth, devoured by Machines. (p. 58)

I see us moving about blindly in eternal Gloom, like May bugs trapped in a box by a cruel child. It’s easy to harm and injure us, to smash up our intricately assembled, bizarre existence. I interpret everything as abnormal, terrible and threatening.

‘Its Animals show the truth about a country,’ I said. ‘It’s attitude towards Animals. If people behave brutally towards Animals, no form of democracy is ever going to help them, in fact nothing will at all.’ (p. 109)

Crime has come to be regarded as a normal, everyday activity. Everyone commits it. That’s just how the world would look if concentration camps became the norm. Nobody would see anything wrong with them.”

I worked at a school and taught the children various useful things: English, handicrafts and geography. I always did my best to capture their attention fully, to have them remember important things not out of fear of a bad mark but out of genuine passion.

It undoubtedly gave us respite, and the corpse (Big Foot’s) lying there became more and more unreal, until it was just an excuse for this gathering of hard-working people on the windy Plateau. We sang about the real Light that exists somewhere far away, imperceptible for now, but that we shall behold as soon as we die. Now we can only see it through a pane of glass, or in a crooked mirror, but one day we shall stand face to face with it. And it will enfold us, for it is our mother this Light, and we came from it.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV)