I travel’d through a Land of Men,
A land of Men & Women too,
And heard & saw such dreadful things
As cold Earth wanderers never knew.

These lines, from William Blake’s “The Mental Traveller”, offer a motif for the most recently translated book by Polish author, Olga Tokarczuk. In her novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, the narrator and central character, anina Duszejko (who dislikes her own name even more than those of other people), discusses possible translations of Blake’s English into Polish with a friend, “Dizzie”. Blake’s poem is an often grim vision of the spiritual history of individuals and civilisations, how hope and liberty are often crushed by Urizenic forces. It is against such forces that Janina and her friends – idiosyncratically named by her as Oddball and Good News, as well as an entomologist, Boros – strive throughout a novel which is a deep, sometimes despairing, often intensely funny, meditation on ecology and mankind’s relations with the animal kingdom, the “dreadful things” which most of us choose not to know.

Drive Your Plow is one of the most Blakean novels ever written, and I would number it among a small handful, including Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, Kenzaburo Oe’s Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! and J.G. Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company, that are suffused throughout with Blake’s ideas and words. Not only does each chapter of Drive Your Plow begin with an aphorism from Blake’s works, but Janina constantly refers to the poet in order to navigate and ground her life and actions, with Auguries of Innocence being the key to her understanding of the cold Earth in which she finds herself. With one important exception that I will go on to at the end of this review – and which necessarily involves an important spoiler to discuss fully – Janina’s actions are constantly guided by the spirit of Blake.

Olga Tokarczuk has become more widely known in the Anglophone world following the Man Booker award given to the translation of her “constellation novel”, Flights, earlier this year, which also won the Nike award in Poland when it was first published in 2007. Trained as a psychologist, her work often deals with parables and mythic elements, and she has been attacked by members of the ruling Law and Justice Party and other “patriots” as a traitor for tarnishing the reputation of Poland with her criticism of xenophobia in the country (it will come as no surprise that Tokarczuk considers herself the true patriot, precisely because she delivers such criticisms). A powerful and intelligent voice in her home country, Tokarczuk’s increasing international reputation means that her latest novel, originally published as Prowad? swój p?ug przez ko?ci umar?ych in 2009, will also receive a much wider audience.

In contrast to the fragmented, nonlinear narrative of Flights, Drive Your Plow ostensibly is a slightly more conventional – if still decidedly offbeat – book that follows Janina as she is caught up in the investigation of a series of deaths in her home town near the border with the Czech Republic. At least one reviewer has compared her to Miss Marple (a foolish and, for reasons that become clear with the novel’s conclusion, impossible comparison), but to me here character, if not her actions, are more reminiscent of Gulley Jimson, the protagonist of Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth. Like Jimson she is odd and eccentric to most of humanity, though with the ability to form very deep and intimate relations with a few human beings, and, like him, William Blake is always at hand to provide an aphorism to explain the complexities of life. Indeed, the title of Tokarczuk’s novel is taken from one of Blake’s famous proverbs of Hell in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Unlike Gulley Jimson, however, Janina is filled with a profound anger of the world.

That anger arises from the fact that her town is filled with hunters who make it their business to commit murder against the living creatures of the wilderness that surrounds them. When it was released as the film Pokot (“Spoor”) in 2017, director Agnieszka Holland caught the intense beauty of the Polish landscape in winter and summer, a beauty that made the massacre of innocents even more brutal. As one character observes in the film, the town is one of many sites of holocausts that take place across the world every day: while some critics have observed that the cryptic title of Tokarczuk’s novel could refer to the bones of murdered victims whose bodies Janina finds, a reading that makes sense if it is viewed as a more conventional crime novel, my own temptation is to see these bones as belonging to more innocent victims – the deer, boar and even Janina’s dogs who are mercilessly slaughtered if they get in the way of the amusement of men.

The amusement of men is very much a theme of the novel, which also reveals a deep feminist anger: the attitude that allows men to kill animals with impunity also enables them to treat other women as mistresses and whores when young and with contempt when, as with Janina, they inevitably grow old. That the hero of the novel was once an engineer counts for nothing: now she is seen as nothing more than a crank obsessed with astrology and animal rights, getting in the way of the real business of the town, a business that is threatened as the corpses of a hunter, the police chief, a rich entrepreneur, the mayor of the town, and eventually its priest are discovered. When Janina informs the police of her belief that the animals are taking their revenge she is treated with derision, while her complaints to the authorities that living creatures are constantly being murdered are ignored.

That it is Janina who sees herself as the angel of these creatures’ vengeance is, strictly speaking, the least Blakean aspect of the novel, a submission to corporeal assault rather than mental fight. Yet even this stems from a deeply considered misreading (if misreading it is) of Blake’s Auguries. Most people will know the poem from its famous opening invocation to “see a world in a grain of sand”, and some will also recognise lines such as “A Robin Redbreast in a Cage / Puts all Heaven in a Rage”, but I suspect that few would understand just how profound the anger of Blake’s poem is. While Auguries of Innocence is a celebration of the innocence of living creatures, it is also motivated by rage against those men who abuse such animals and, through their abuse, become inured to the poverty and injustice inflicted upon their fellow human beings. For Blake, ecological justice does not operate in isolation from social justice, and this is a vision that is shared by Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. When Janina is told that she is crazy for telling one of the villagers not to kill animals, she responds with a Rintrah-like rage:

At that point I felt a surge of Anger, genuine, not to say Divine Anger. It flooded me from inside in a burning hot wave. This energy made me feel great, as if it were lifting off the ground, a mini Big Bang within the universe of my body. There was fire burning within me, like a neutron star. I sprang forward and pushed the Man in the silly hat so hard that he fell onto the snow, completely taken by surprise. And when Moustachio rushed to his aid, I attacked him too, hitting him on the shoulder with all my might. He groaned with pain. I am not a feeble girl. (p.72)

Like Rintrah, like Orc, like one of the devils with whom Blake converses in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Janina follows a morality that is askance, skewed from that of her fellow men. It would be more than possible to read the violence that she commits as profoundly immoral, operating against other men, but for me that ignores the deep rejection of a false society that she is forced into by men who do not care for all the blood on their hands, nor for the damage they wantonly inflict on the world around them. In a remarkable scene towards the end of the novel, Janina is forcibly expelled from a church for railing against the priest who blesses the hunters. This priest corrupts the story of Saint Hubert, a murderer of animals who is converted to Christianity when he feels compassion towards his prey, into a panacea for those who wish to kill. The church, like the police and the school in which Janina occasionally works, are symbols of a mundane, deep-rooted repression that is sanctioned by church and state. When such daily violence is blessed by angels, Janina believes that she has no choice but to cast her lot in with devils.

 

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018. RRP: £12.99.

Upon opening Julia Fine’s debut novel, What Should Be Wild, the reader is confronted by a dark ink blot of a family tree, a gothic sprawl upon the page that lists in fine, white text the lineage of the novel’s central character, Maisie Cothay, whose father, Peter, had married into the Blakelys. That family name is one of several shifting allusions to William Blake that are contained within the book. That ancestry descends from an unknown, white blankness at the top of the page (which, as is later hinted at, precedes some variant of the Ango-Saxon age) to a solid entry in black text that reads: Maisie B. 1990.

What Should Be Wild, then, is set in a time approximating the current age, although there are subtle hints that it is not our world but rather its dream image. The location, Coeurs Crossing, is somewhere that really belongs in a tale by Charles Perrault or the Grimm brothers, and this uncertainty allows Fine enough freedom to play with the atmosphere of this strange space without being tied to all-too familiar places. It is most similar, perhaps, to the Oxford of Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy, an author whose influence Fine has acknowledge in an interview with Qwillery magazine. The link to Pullman also allows her to subtly allude to another source, William Blake, and the key to the Blakely family does indeed include William, the father of Helen, born in 1660, one of seven daughters who is trapped near the house and whose story slowly unfolds throughout the novel.

Without revealing too much of the plot, the story of What Should Be Wild centres on Maisie, interwoven with the tales of her seven ancestors, all of whom have grown up in a strange house (a gloomy Manderley) named Urizon that was built by William Blakely. Maisie, as we discover in the opening pages, is one of a line of cursed women and is herself a literal marriage of life and death, able to kill and revive creatures with her touch. It is this morbid power that led to her mother’s death while she was still in the womb, and Maisie has grown up in Urizon alone with her father, Peter, an introverted, academic figure who married into the Blakely family and, for much of the novel, occupies an ambiguous position. When Peter disappears into the woods surrounding Urizon, into which it seems no man can venture and remain sane, and from which the daughters of Urizon cannot escape once they have entered, Maisie sets out in search of him accompanied by two companions, Matthew and Rafe. As the novel slowly progresses, so we learn more about Urizon, the seven women and the strange, black-eyed girl who spontaneously generated within the forest after the birth of Maisie.

Some reviewers appear to have had problems with What Should Be Wild in terms of its genre: although the novel seems to have appealed greatly to many readers, for others its uneasy classification as fantasy or horror or thriller has affected how they have approached it, especially in terms of pace or plotting. The dreamlike quality of the book certainly works against it as a piece of detective fiction, and attempts to construct it as a feminist version of Pushing Daisies also seem a little wide of the mark to me. In the interview mentioned previously, Fine indicates that some of her other influences include Karen Russell, Doris Lessing (whose The Golden Notebook is cited at the beginning of the novel), Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter, and Audrey Niffenegger has also warmly praised the book. If there is a genre to which this book belongs, it is perhaps Carter’s feminist retellings of fairy tales, and as such another critical comment by some readers and reviewers – that the seven women do not really work as characters – was less important to me when set against a backdrop of zoas, emanations and spectres.

There are various subtle reminders of William Blake throughout the novel – one location is Urthon Hill, for example, while a chapter on “Symmetry and balance” invokes the tyger and notions of contraries – but it is Urizon that most clearly links him to What Should Be Wild. The house is a literary emblem, part Rebecca’s Manderley, part Miss Havisham’s Satis House, also reminiscent of Poe’s House of Usher: its name is almost certainly intended to invoke the notion of Urizenic reason, the masculine imposition of which imprisons all the women of the novel, but Fine’s characterisation of the place is more sophisticated than that. Urizon is also a home, a haven, and its final destruction also represents the shock of uncertainty that freedom brings as well as its pleasures. That ambivalence also extends to the relationship between Maisie and her father, Peter: I kept expecting him to become more clearly malign but he is perhaps closer to a (rather less dynamic) Lord Asriel in Pullman’s trilogy. The relations between the two do appear to evoke a Blakean spirit, however: as in “The Little Girl Lost”, Maisie wanders like Lyca through the “desert wild” until she is found by her parents among the tigers and lions, asleep. The beast of prey here is the silent, malevolent black eyed girl:

What is this girl? All of the Blakely women wonder. Is she a demon, biding her time? Some sort of savior? The dark twin of the girl at Urizon? One of their own, unborn daughters made flesh? The girl was born within the wood, not taken later, like the rest of them. There is nothing of the outside world upon her. Nothing broken. No scarred flesh. (P.65)

This silent girl is as evil as the woods, but it is a wild evil outside the place of men that exists upon its own terms (and, as each of the Blakely women recall their experiences, less brutal than the evils of men, though perhaps ultimately more fatal). It is a marriage of sorts between Maisie and this girl that the novel aspires to. A more mundane struggle between good and evil angels takes place between Matthew and Rafe, Maisie’s male companions. In the case of Maisie at least, overt sexual awakenings are dealt with more subtly, although the literal bleeding that takes place is a violation as sickening as any rape (and resolved in as satisfying a manner as would occur in one of Angela Carter’s stories). Rather than a marriage of good and evil, the figures of Matthew and Rafe are perhaps best viewed as Maisie’s emanation and spectre, one who will fulfil her, the other a negation of her desires, one of the many feminist twists of Fine’s book that subverts Blake’s masculine model of the human psyche.

The conclusion of the novel, where Maisie meets her dark alter ego, reminds me somewhat of Blake’s Milton a Poem, where Milton confronts and reclaims his spectre, Satan. If that is the case (and not simply me reading too much into the book), then Fine once more teases and twists that conclusion, creating a true marriage of what has been inhibited and what should be wild, a union of heaven and hell. A text that may be closer to the author’s intentions is Visions of the Daughters of Albion, not only for its accounts of Oothoon’s brutal treatment at the hands of Bromion and Theotormon, but also for the determination of the hero and the clarity of her perceptions:

Ask the wild ass why he refuses burdens: and the meek camel
Why he loves man: is it because of eye ear mouth or skin
Or breathing nostrils? No. for these the wolf and tyger have.
Ask the blind worm the secrets of the grave, and why her spires
Love to curl round the bones of death; and ask the rav’nous snake
Where she gets poison: & the wing’d eagle why he loves the sun
And then tell me the thoughts of man, that have been hid of old. (3.8-14, E47)

Oothoon’s understanding of the extra-sensory elements of the natural world seems to be a suitable model for the awakening of Maisie. Visions is also Blake’s early work that introduces Urizen as “Creator of men! Mistaken Demon of heaven” one whose “joys are tears! thy labour vain, to form men to thine image.” (5.3-4, E48). Although nowhere near as malevolent as Urizen, Peter has mistakenly tried to make his daughter into his own image, to protect her as much as to conform her, and if the house of Urizon is a haven it is also clearly a prison. The daughters of Urizon have frequently sought escape from its confines only to become trapped in turn in the woods beyond the house of men: Maisie’s union with the wild child of that forest is what finally liberates her.

What Should Be Wild is wonderfully written, and Julia Fine’s style is frequently beautiful and poetic without being laboured, as when she describes the end of the house which William Blakely built:

The forest spools and gathers, holds its breath until evening. In the dark it protracts to take a fuller span of William Blakely’s masterpiece, Urizon, Helen’s home. Mary’s home. Emma’s and Lucy’s. The ivy moves quickest, sneaking in through the cracks in the stone, under the doors, forcing them wider. The roots of the yard oaks crack like cramped legs and extend themselves, sighing as they stretch against the floorboards, popping them loose. Tree branches tap windows. Wild roses, sharp-edged and hideously sweet, thorn through and scent the parlors. The outside comes in. Centuries of stagnation have exploded into action; eternal life, an eternal inertia, releasing all the force it’s held at bay. (P.291)

Some readers appear to have been confounded by the pacing and plotting of the novel, and, in this respect, for her first novel Fine might have been better served by the more compact visions of Angela Carter, whose relative brevity made her easier for many to digest. This is the difficulty of literary fantasy, a genre that operates outside many of the restrictions of typical genre expectations. For those, such as myself, interested in how William Blake can be taken up and transmuted into a feminist tale of awakening and transformation, it is a thoroughly fascinating and beautifully poetic novel.

 

Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild, Harper, 2018. RRP, hardback: £20.99.