When Duszejko tries to call the police in order to report the first mysterious death the automated voice that replies does so in Czech.

The phone signal, as if an analogue of her desire, wanders across the border. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t, because their language isn’t suited to quarrelling.” 4 Animals flee to the Czech Republic, and the sun does too. The people there are capable of discussing things calmly and nobody quarrels with anyone else. The border would appear in my mind, and that gentle, beautiful country beyond it.” 3 Her fellow villagers are liars and hypocrites, the surrounding wilderness is riddled with animal slaughter and a series of inexplicable murders, but, she believes, “n the Czech Republic it’s totally different. Following a long illness, she dreams and dozes, telling us, “In my somnolent state I also thought about the Czech Republic. 2 Relentlessly discontent with reality as it is, the Duszejko of Drive Your Plow often thinks about her neighbouring utopia. The village’s hunting culture is the main target of her ire, and in both the novel and the film Duszejko frequently makes a spectacle of herself as she attempts to delimit or forbid its activities, charging through her small village like an Elizabeth Costello with even less credit, arguing with policemen, hunters and priests, and ruining the school play.

If the line between the two countries is unreliable, Duszejko’s divisions are absolute, her world neatly organised into good and evil. She lives at a cultivated distance from an unnamed village in the Kłodzko Valley, a forested, mountainous region that borders the Czech Republic. 1 In both Drive Your Plow and its film adaptation, Agnieszka Holland’s Pokot ( Spoor, 2017), which was co-written with Tokarczuk, Duszejko – who prefers to be called by her last name – is a committed vegetarian and animal activist. For Janina Duszejko, the Polish protagonist of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead ( Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych), the Czech Republic, which is just over the shifting, imprecisely delineated border, is a strange utopia.

Drive your plow over