Three Bags Full

October 31, 2023 3:15 PM

In Leonie Swann's Three Bags Full, "[t]he mysterious death of their shepherd has sent a flock of sheep into a frenzy trying to piece together “whodunit.” Overcoming their “sheepish” ways, the members of the flock realize that they may be the only ones who can solve it" (Publishers Weekly).

Kirkus: "For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. "

Goodreads: "The A-team of investigators includes Othello, the “bad-boy” black ram; Mopple the Whale, a Merino who eats a lot and remembers everything; and Zora, a pensive black-faced ewe with a weakness for abysses. Joined by other members of the richly talented flock, they engage in nightlong discussions about the crime, wild metaphysical speculations, and embark on reconnaissance missions into the village, where they encounter some likely suspects. Along the way, the sheep confront their own all-too-human struggles with guilt, misdeeds, and unrequited love. "

posted by MonkeyToes (5 comments total)

This is going to sound impossibly pretentious, but I read this in the original German a few years ago and highly recommend it for “advanced-intermediate” German learners looking for a first novel.
posted by jedicus at 3:32 PM on October 31, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think I liked this one. But I approached it incorrectly, as a mystery, when I should have slowed down to consider it a book about the power of story--shaping how we see events and our own relationships to others, and how much we rely on stories to construct common understandings. Seeing it through the eyes, ears, and noses of the sheep helped make it strange to me, though I fought it, wanting to use my own ways of reading mysteries. I liked these characters: Miss Maple, and her thoughtfulness; Melmoth the wanderer; Zora, who loves the abyss; Mopple the Whale, gifted with remembering. I liked their insistence on finding out what kind of story they were witnessing: a love story? A fairy tale? A detective story? Nothing is easy for these sheep in figuring out what has happened, limited as they are by being, well, sheep in a pasture, most without much memory or ability to concentrate--but Swann solves this problem neatly by (mostly) bringing the humans to the grass. They are piecing it together, stumblingly, but their advantage lies in their noses, which detect the truthful state behind the stories that humans want others to believe. I liked the flock's tolerance for its outliers: the thoughtful, the the odd, the wandering, and the way they are not outcasts but allowed to follow their own intellectual urgings, and allowed both space and belonging. As opposed to the humans: "Imagine that you're living in a flock, and one day you find out that the others aren't sheep at all--they're wolves." But I think I need to re-read this one with those ideas in mind. (I read this one because I came across a book club on Bluesky, and this was the current choice; I might not have picked it up otherwise. There were times it made me think of Terry Pratchett ("What's justice?") and Jasper Fforde (the whimsy of talking animals), but it is more dour than either somehow.)
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:11 PM on October 31, 2023 [3 favorites]

Did Babe finally loose the chains of his bondage?
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:57 AM on November 1, 2023

I loved this book and didn't know it appeared first in German-- neat!
posted by travertina at 2:04 PM on November 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh this is a great one, yeah. It's not super common for a book to be about talking animals and yet also pretty naturalistic, and I really appreciated that here. (And it's a fun take on cozy mystery tropes.)
posted by restless_nomad at 1:29 PM on November 4, 2023