Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

New syllabus (first HSC 2027). This text is prescribed for the 2027 to 2030 HSC under the English Advanced 11-12 (2024) syllabus (focus area: Textual conversations, paired with William Blake's Complete Poems).
It is not on the 2019 to 2026 list that the 2026 HSC uses. Sitting the 2026 HSC? See the 2019 to 2026 text list.

Why this text suits Textual conversations

Olga Tokarczuk's novel (published in Polish in 2009; NESA sets the English translation published by Text Publishing in 2018) takes its title from a line in Blake's Proverbs of Hell, and Blake's words and ideas run through it. That makes it an unusually direct partner for the poetry. Tokarczuk, a Polish writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, does not merely echo Blake. She tests his visionary, anti-institutional stance in a modern, rural, morally murky setting. The novel is in copyright, so this page paraphrases and does not quote.

The novel at a glance

The narrator, Janina Duszejko, is an older woman living in a remote village in the hills near the Czech border. She was once a bridge engineer, now teaches English to children in a small school, studies astrology and cares passionately about animals. When local men with links to hunting begin to die, she develops her own theory about why. The police and the village treat her as a harmless eccentric, so she is not believed. Part crime story, part dark comedy, part moral fable, the book asks readers to decide how far to trust her. Avoid summarising the ending in an exam answer; analyse how the book is built to leave you judging her.

Voice: the engine of the book

Everything depends on Duszejko's first-person voice. Look at:

• Idiosyncratic style. She capitalises certain words and ideas in a way that makes ordinary terms feel charged. Treat this as characterisation, and ask what it reveals about how she sees the world.
• Unreliability. Her certainty about stars, signs and animals alongside her sharp observation of people and places makes her both persuasive and doubtful. Examiners reward responses that hold both possibilities open.
• Humour. Her irritability, her nicknames for neighbours and her contempt for pomposity make the book funny, which makes its moral seriousness more surprising.
• Dismissal. The way officials speak to her about her age, gender and sensitivity is itself a theme. The novel makes readers notice who is credited with reason and who is not.

Genre and structure

The book borrows the structure of a crime novel (deaths, suspects, an investigation) and uses it for philosophical ends. Instead of asking only who committed the crimes, it asks what counts as justice when the law protects hunting and ignores animal suffering. Look at how the chapters are organised around Blake's words, how the seasonal setting and the local landscape are used, and how information is delayed or planted. The genre expectations are part of the argument: readers are drawn to want a neat solution and are then asked whether that wish is itself the problem.

Blake inside the novel

Blake appears not as decoration but as a way of thinking. Duszejko and a former pupil translate Blake together, and his words give her language for what she sees as the cruelty of hunters and the complacency of institutions. The title proverb is an instruction to live energetically and to defy the caution that would keep a person quiet. Ask what the novel does with that instruction: does it endorse Duszejko's defiance, complicate it, or both?

Context as a driver of argument

The setting is rural Poland after the communist period, where the Church, local officials and hunting clubs hold real power. The novel's anger at hunting culture and at an indifferent bureaucracy is therefore tied to a community's habits, not just to animal rights in the abstract. At the same time, the text invites a wider reading about who gets to speak with authority and who is written off. This is how Tokarczuk's context drives her argument, and why the novel can speak to Blake's London even though the places differ.

Conversation with its pair

Read the novel beside Blake's Complete Poems and make your argument about how each text changes the other.

Values

Both texts prize imagination and compassion, including toward animals, and both treat conformity and institutional certainty with suspicion. Blake offers the moral vocabulary, in set poems such as The Tyger and The Human Abstract, and Tokarczuk tests it against the pressure of a real community. The novel also complicates Blake: can a visionary be trusted when her certainty leads to harm?

Context

Blake writes in the early industrial age, protesting the Church, the state and child labour. Tokarczuk writes from late-twentieth and early twenty-first century Poland, where different institutions hold power but the same pattern recurs: the dissenting voice is called eccentric. Reading them together shows a consistent structure across two centuries and two countries.

Form

Blake's lyrics compress argument into song and symbol. Tokarczuk's novel builds a voice through length, detail and suspense. The lyric can assert and intensify; the novel can doubt and test. Compare how each form handles the reader's trust in the speaker.

Common pitfalls

• Treating Duszejko as simply right, or simply mad. The book works because it will not settle.
• Reading the novel as animal-rights propaganda. It is a literary text that questions its own narrator.
• Spoiling the ending in detail. Analyse how the book is constructed instead.
• Forgetting that the English text is a translation. Attribute stylistic effects carefully, and keep to what the English edition does.

Essay scaffold

Introduction

State a thesis on the conversation: for example, that Blake supplies the language of visionary dissent and Tokarczuk tests it, showing both its moral force and its risks.

Body 1

Duszejko's voice: idiosyncrasy, unreliability and humour as tools of argument.

Body 2

Genre and structure: the crime plot as a vehicle for questions about justice.

Body 3

The conversation with Blake: shared values, different contexts and how lyric and novel handle the dissenting voice.

Conclusion

Argue that Tokarczuk both inherits and tests Blake's visionary dissent: Duszejko's anger gives a moral force that Blake would recognise, while the novel's unreliable voice and its crime plot make the reader ask what a vision costs when it turns into action.

Read the text

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is in copyright. NESA sets the Text Publishing edition (2018, ISBN 9781925773088, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones). Borrow it from a library or buy that edition, and do not use unauthorised copies. Blake's own poems, which the novel quotes and echoes, are in the public domain and covered in our Blake page.

Sources

• NESA, HSC English prescriptions (checked 7 October 2026, year 2026).
• NESA, English Advanced Year 12 content pages: page 1, page 2, page 3 (prescription lists, checked 7 October 2026).