Review of Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann, pub. Black Swan 2007

This unmissable book is a murder mystery, in which the detectives happen to be a flock of Irish sheep (I knew I was going to like it from the moment I read the list of "Dramatis Oves"). And no, it isn't aimed at children or young adults, nor, though it has richly comic elements, is it purely comedy. We are very much in the sheep viewpoint, in that there is no scene at which sheep are not present, though, being humans, we sometimes see what we are watching differently from them. Not better, just differently. It is because we see through their eyes that we know, long before any of the humans, that two characters are related – the sheep can at once tell that they have the same smell. And though, obviously, these aren't your average sheep, they don't think like woolly humans either:

"If it's a hole in his memory we ought to stop it up with more memories," said Cordelia. "You stop up a hole in the earth with more earth."
"But you don't stop up a rat-hole with more rats," said Cloud.
"You could," Cordelia insisted, "if they were very fat rats."

They use their own experience of the world, and of humans (and some, like the Hebridean ram Othello, have more than others) to try to make sense of the sudden death of their shepherd George and the peculiar behaviour of the surviving inhabitants of Glennkill (the macaronic pun on kill and cil, the Gaelic for church, is no accident). They also pool their varying talents. Chief detective Miss Maple, who didn't get her name for the reason you think, is intensely curious and intelligent; Othello knows more about people than most; Mopple, a merino with an insatiable appetite, also has a good memory. And then there's the enigmatic Melmoth….

Part of the appeal of this book is that the sheep, though their individual characters are every bit as well-defined and engaging as any human's, never quite stop being sheep. The landscape of smells in the barn:

The heat had hunted old smells out of all the corners. A young mouse who had died under the wooden planks last summer. George sweating as he forked hay through the hatch in the roof and down on them, a fragrant shower. A screw that had fallen out of his radio and still smelled the way it used to, of metal and music.

And at the same time they are more than sheep, or maybe sheep's mental processes just are more than we know anyway; who can say for sure that this mental soliloquy isn't going on inside Melmoth's head as he returns from who knows where?

On the other side of the dolmen youth grazed, his own youth, with strong limbs and a sense of joy in its belly, but stupid, so stupid you could almost feel sorry for it in its happiness. On the other side of the dolmen was the meadow that couldn't exist, the Way Back. He had looked for it all over the world, under smooth stones, on the far side of the wind, in the eyes of night-birds, in pools of quiet water. […] Now the Way Back had curled up, like a woodlouse, into a single step to be taken.

These characters become very real to us, so that, watching the humans along with Melmoth, we share George's puzzlement (and contempt) when he and butcher Ham stumble upon a dead man's body which the butcher cannot bring himself to touch:

"That's different. Completely different. My God, George, this is a body."
George shrugged. "Did you think you worked with some kind of fruit in your job?"

Reviews of murder mysteries ought not to contain spoilers, so I'll add only that this isn't much like any other novel I have read recently and that I would be very sorry not to have been pointed in its direction. It's a re-reader for sure.