It's embarrassing to admit, but after reading a few pages of this delightful mystery, I wanted to skip to the last chapter because if it didn't have a happy ending, I wanted nothing to do with it. (Did I? Perhaps.) And I've gone completely off lamb. You may, too, after you've fallen for the 17 sheep in this captivating flock, like Miss Maple, the cleverest sheep in Glennkill; Mopple, the memory sheep, a very stout Merino ram who forgets nothing he hears; Zora, a Blackface sheep with a head for heights, who delights in looking into the abyss; Melmoth, the legendary ram who disappeared and is a cautionary tale for lambs; or Othello, the black Hebridean with a mysterious past involving a circus and a cruel clown.
The sheep find George, their shepherd, lying in the green Irish grass one morning, and realize straightaway that he didn't die of an illness. The spade in his body attested to that. Maple decides that they should find his murderer. "No one had a right to stick a spade in him. That's wolfish behavior. That's murder." And when they've found the culprit? "Justice!" The sheep proudly raise their heads. "Justice!" they bleat in chorus. Fortunately, the flock is well-versed in the theory of murder, due to their literary education. "Sheep are not talkative folk. That's because their mouths are often full of grass, and sometimes they have nothing but grass in their heads. But all sheep love good stories. What they like to do best is listen, marveling--for one thing, because it is easy to listen and chew at the same time." So George used to read them romance novels--the sheep call them Pamelas, since there was always a Pamela who was always in peril--and also mysteries, which is where they get the idea to investigate, using evidence, discussion and motivation. They quickly discover one important clue--what some suspicious villagers are looking for after George's death:
"Grass," said Zora. "Tom said they were looking for grass."
That seemed to the sheep too sensible. Humans didn't normally have such reasonable aims.
The sheep first create a memorial to George, a small plot of land where they cannot graze, no matter how alluring the mouse weed and clover. Then, as they begin to navigate on their own, a bad shepherd named Gabriel tries to take over the flock. Othello first recognizes the animal trainer in the man: "The same few gestures, the same boredom in the eyes. The same malice behind the deceptive friendliness." The rest of the flock soon agree and turn their rear ends toward his caravan and graze straight past him, showing ovine contempt. In order to get rid of him, they decide to teach Gabriel to fear them, drawing on what they heard when George read a sheep disease text to them. They rehearse in the hay barn, and when they trot out later, hilariously feigning symptoms of scrapie, they scare Gabriel with panache.
Leonie Swann writes lyrically about sheep and wisdom, throwing in a bit pf philosophy and a generous dollop of gentle humor: "But how will we find the takeaway [behind the church]? Or the church? We don't even know what a church is." In spite of their somewhat dire straights, the sheep are surrounded by beauty and they know it: "Fairies had danced on the grass overnight and left thousands of dewdrops behind. The sea looked as if it had been licked clean, blue and clear and smooth, and there were a few woolly little clouds in the sky. Legend said that these clouds were sheep who had simply wandered over the cliff tops one day, special sheep who now went on grazing in the sky and were never shorn. In any case, they were a good sign." Some of the loveliest writing is about their sense of smell. In the barn, the heat had pushed scents out of the nooks and crannies: "George's sweat from forking hay, a radio screw that still smelled of metal and music, blood from Othello's wound and the stinging ointment, swallows' eggs under the roof. The smell of many lambs. The smell of snow. Powder on butterfly wings."
One of Swann's finest characters is Othello, whom George rescued from certain death. When the winter lamb asks Othello about justice, he recalls his days in the circus--the sheep given to the beasts of prey, Othello used for a knife-throwing act because blood didn't show on his back fleece, being passed on to the sadistic clown. That was injustice. When Othello lost his temper with the clown's ugly dog, the dog didn't survive. That was justice. But the clown sold Othello to the knacker. Unjust! The knacker took him to the dogfights. Unjust! Othello ponders all this and then defines justice for the winter lamb: "When you can trot where you like and graze where you want. When you can fight to go your own way. When no one steals your way from you. That's justice!"
Three Bags Full is appealing and amusing, with moments of sadness and poignancy. The sheep are curious and determined, no matter how often they are waylaid by green grass and drowsy naps, and their ruminations on "human beings with their small souls and sticking-out noses" are perceptive. Prepare to be utterly charmed.--Marilyn Dahl