Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann

August was supposed to be Women in Translation month. So I turned to Leonie Swann’s Three Bags Full, a book translated from German to English (thanks to BookWyrm Knits for telling me that).

Three Bags Full is apparently one of those books where nothing bad happens to our main characters — at least that’s what the commenters said on this Tor post by Jo Walton. The book happens to be about a flock of sheep playing detective. I was easy prey because I’m all for light, breezy reads right now (still going through a reading slump!).

Getting to the plot:

George the shepherd has been murdered, and loads of people in this small Irish village are eyeing his sheep and his caravan. That includes the butcher, the priest, the local do-gooder, his ex-wife, his potential girlfriend, his rival sheep-breeder, the local no-good village boys, and so forth. Something havey-cavey was going on.

George’s sheep want answers. They are a motley bunch. There’s clever Miss Maple (not Miss Marple), the turning-senile Sir Ritchfield, the rebellious Othello, the adventurous Melmoth, and Mopple with the very good memory. They also make up one of the last standing Cladoir flocks of Ireland. A rare collection, you can tell.

So what this was like:

The mystery itself was kind of confusing, because everything is being told from the sheep’s perspective. They don’t really know the right words for human cultural inventions — such as perfume, languages, poetry, revolvers, churches. They definitely don’t know who “God” is — this leads to some particularly funny instances where they think God is the murderer because “only God knows where George has gone off to”.

“No one had an easy time with George,” said the long-nosed man. “He was a lost soul, a lamb gone astray, but the Lord in his infinite mercy has taken him home again.”
The sheep looked at one another in surprise. Cloud bleated.
…
“It was that lord who did it!” cried Heather suddenly. “He took George home with him. And then it happened. They quarreled, first with words and then with the sword. Only there wasn’t any sword handy so he used the spade.”

There are also many “sheep” related puns thrown in — like the wolf in sheep’s clothing, woolgathering, counting sheep, the herd way of thinking, black sheep, grim reaper… You get the idea. It’s amusing in the first half, but grows tiring in the second half.

You also get the idea that the villagers are not a well-meaning crowd. There’s a lot of dark stuff going on in the background. But because we see it only through the eyes of the innocent sheep, it never slams us in the face. We just see the sheep making sheepish (pardon the pun!) observations about human oddness. But it’s there. I wonder how the author will take it ahead in the sequels.

Would I recommend Swann’s book?

It’s such a unique spin that it’s worth a shot. However, perhaps best not to expect too much of a good thing. It’s interesting, but not spellbinding. It would have made a fun comic but as a book it felt way too long and tedious.

Rating: 6.5 of 10

What have you been reading? Read any translated works recently? Hope everyone has been having a good reading phase!