An offbeat whodunnit from the author of “Flights”

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. By Olga Tokarczuk. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Fitzcarraldo Editions; 269 pages; £12.99.

THE narrator of this offbeat whodunnit describes herself and her fellow misfits as “the sort of people whom the world regards as useless”. Yet “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” is a warning not to underestimate the lowly. Olga Tokarczuk, its Polish author, can speak from experience. In May she won the Man Booker International prize for the English translation of another novel, “Flights”. At the award ceremony, she wore a pair of earrings she had bought while working as a hotel chambermaid in London. Today she is spoken of as a future Nobel laureate.

Ms Tokarczuk’s forthright support for feminism, ecological causes and minority rights has attracted the wrath of Polish conservatives. Her fiction, however, eschews overt advocacy. It draws on fables, myths, even mysticism, to conjure its distinctive moods. Whereas “Flights” wove several plot-strands into a patchwork meditation on travel, exile and the quest for home, “Drive Your Plow” adopts—but subverts—a more conventional genre. First published in Polish in 2009, the novel takes the form of a maverick murder-mystery.

Its narrator, Janina Duszejko, is an elderly semi-recluse. At first sight, she is one of those “old women who wander around with their shopping-bags”, ignored and patronised by (almost) everyone. Janina lives in an upland area of south-western Poland near the Czech border: a backwater where the winter snows convince her that “the world was not created for Mankind”. She looks after holiday homes, fitfully teaches English, and translates William Blake, the Romantic poet whose visionary words lend Ms Tokarczuk her title and resonate through the book.

Janina cherishes the local fauna and detests the hunters who slaughter the creatures with impunity, believing that “if people behave brutally towards Animals, no form of democracy is ever going to help them”. She once worked as an engineer, but casts horoscopes and respects astrology as “solid knowledge”.

A series of mysterious deaths disrupts the backwoods idyll. The trigger-happy slayers of wildlife are themselves culled. First “Big Foot”, a notorious poacher, expires. Soon, bigger human game comes messily to grief: a police chief, a fox-fur farmer, a hunt-loving priest. A bigwig known as “the President” dies, seemingly “suffocated by cockchafers” after the ball of the Mushroom Pickers’ Society.

Ms Tokarczuk has a ball of her own. Sardonic humour and gothic plot-twists add a layer of macabre rustic comedy. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, an outstanding Polish-English translator, sculpts Janina’s English voice (complete with Blakean capitalisations) with panache.

So who lies behind this “vengeance of Animals”? The resolution feels perfunctory; Ms Tokarczuk deploys a trick that will be familiar to Agatha Christie fans. Still, she knits satire and philosophy with a deliciously droll touch. Much like Blake, Janina imagines the world as “a great big net”. This “complex Cosmos of correspondences” meshes together “like a Japanese car”. Human or animal, the humbler links in the engine of life will enjoy their bittersweet revenge.