Anna Burns‘ Milkman (2018) won the Man Booker Prize last year; as such, there are plenty of reviews of it to be found on the web (and is the second in back-to-back highly contemporary entries on Reading Well). I’ll just summarize the novel as a compelling exploration of life in a highly stressed community, where every action–and, indeed, most thoughts–full under intense scrutiny.
The specifics matter, of course: Milkman is set in Northern Ireland in the 70s, at the height of the violent clashes between British and Republican forces. This is not explicitly named in the novel, indeed, nothing really is: the main character’s dubious and part-time boyfriend is only referred to as maybe-boyfriend, her younger set of twins as wee-sisters, her elder siblings as first-sister or second-brother, and England as the-land-over-the-waters.
This is awkward at first, but easily adjusted to, and serves twin purposes: first, it speaks to the possible universality of communities in crisis and second, it reinforces the main antagonist of the novel’s role as an unknown and highly protected identity, only known as Milkman (not to be confused with real-milkman, who actually delivers milk).
I want to highlight two small realizations from the novel. First, if I had not read
Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s The Dirty Dust, I don’t think I would have recognized Milkman as belonging to what I interpret as an explicitly Irish tradition. There is a rhythm to the writing, a repetitiveness and circularity to its structure, that feels directly related to Ó Cadhain, but also to Synge and Beckett (and those names emerge solely out of my ignorance of the tradition–I’m sure scholars and deep fans of Irish writing could correct/expand the list).
In any case, it was nice to have my reading of Milkman deepened by that recognition. It also led to realization #2:
This is one of a very small number of books I’ve ever read where I found myself saying, I bet the audiobook of this absolutely rocks. Much as when reading The Dirty Dust, I found the linguistic patterns to be slow reading, and while I appreciated them–especially their rhythm and their tendency to go off-kilter in the midst of repetition, throwing in items that weren’t quite similar to the rest of the list–I thought the impact would be even greater listening to the text.
Milkman isn’t a quick read, nor an easy one: it is powerfully disquieting, and its focus–on the constant threat of retribution and violence, not those actions themselves–lends an air of foreboding that permeates acts as normal as running in a park or watching a sunset. But it’s a worthwhile read, for sure.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
I haven’t read anything else by Burns, so I don’t know if the style of Milkman is hers in a more pervasive sense, or is one she adopted for this novel particularly. Regardless, it serves her well, and I don’t have a sense of that kind of voice in my own writing.