Krzywda

Conventional wisdom might have it that the fiction writer’s only appropriate response to our troubled, and troubling, times is to address all the political, ecological and social chaos head on. This means that, on the surface, there could hardly be anything more out of step than Paweł Rzewuski’s mock-Baroque Chinese box of a novel, filled with colourful mayhem and fantastical creatures.

And yet, while the setting comes from a remote time and place, the anxieties on display in Harm (the title shares its name with the protagonists’ family coat of arms) are distinctly 21st century: the mass deaths of animals and sudden withering of trees, the sense of nature gone horribly awry. The blithe nastiness of noblemen toward maids, the raunchy misadventures of the clergy, the inability of the sexes to get along. The decay of national politics seemingly mirroring the environmental disaster. Is that a frenzied bear ripping apart those who stray unwarily into the forest, or maybe a werewolf? Have the Giedko brothers really been possessed by the Devil?

Rzewuski unravels his mysteries slowly, with a real sense of purpose. And though his language is playfully anachronistic and his setting quite unfamiliar, most English-language readers ought to be surprised at how immediate and entertaining this 17th-century romp really is.