As you may know, Milkman by the Northern Irish author Anna Burns was the winner of the Man Booker Prize 2018
Kwame Anthony Appiah, 2018 Chair of judges, had this to say:
‘None of us has ever read anything like this before. Anna Burns’ utterly distinctive voice challenges conventional thinking and form in surprising and immersive prose. It is a story of brutality, sexual encroachment and resistance, threaded with mordant humour. Set in a society divided against itself, Milkman explores the insidious forms oppression can take in everyday life.’
On finishing it I was left with a similar feeling as when I completed another Booker prize-winning novel, Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings, that is, a feeling of exhaustion and of wonder, how could an author sustain this kind of writing, stay with this voice, day after day for as long as it took to write this? And what must it be like to live in or imagine living in a community as stifling as this. Just astounding.
I am in awe. It is no easy read, for it is written in a kind of double, triple speak, depicting a life and set of circumstances that is constantly in check, a circumventing of self. It describes from the inside how one young woman navigates daily life in a community that has drawn so many convoluted, coded lines of behaviour, that lives by so many unspoken, rigidly enforced violent rules, that has morphed into something so far from authenticity, that only the very ‘different’, appear able to, or indeed risk, living life true unto themselves, except those who left the country forever, their tale not told here, those that got away.
All this is told through the stream of consciousness narrative of an 18-year-old girl, as she observes her community and family insinuate a dramatic story onto her about a 40 something married man they call ‘Milkman’ (not to be confused with “the milkman”), a narrative trussed up by rumour, assumption, gossip, anything uttered or speculated on, except what the young woman has to say.
It doesn’t help that the one time she comes out of her silence and decides to share the boring truth, that there is and has never been anything going on between her and this man, she tells this to her pious mother, the one place she might find support.
During this ma looked at me without interruption but when I finished, and without hesitation she called me a liar, saying this deceit was nothing but a further mockery of herself. She spoke of other meetings then, between me and the milkman, besides the two to which I admitted. The community was keeping her abreast, she said, which meant she knew I met him for immoral trysts and assignations, knew too, of what we got up to in places too indecent even to give the ‘dot dot dot’ to. ‘You’re some sort of mob-woman,’ she said. ‘Out of the pale. Lost your intrinsic rights and wrongs. You make it hard, wee girl, to love you and if your poor father was alive, certainly he’d have something to say about this.’ she said. I doubted it.
‘Middle sister’ as she is referred to, thinks in a kind of coded language full of uttered phrases that substitute for a more succinct opinion, so that even the reader must enter into this “insinuating” talk to understand her thoughts, for nothing is stated plainly, just as nothing is observed or clarified as it really is. And we get good at it, at this revealing what is really being said, even beginning to see the humor in it, when none of it really is funny, there’s too much death, tragedy, sadness, ridiculousness. It’s not a life, it’s a trap.
It is a kind of prison that she manages temporarily to escape from or live with by going running with third brother-in-law, taking French lessons and ‘reading while walking’ literature from other, older centuries. But trying to remain separate and invisible to all the categories, has put her in the worst possible position, ‘beyond the pale’, her longest friend since primary school informs her.
‘Even you must appreciate, that as far as they’re concerned you’ve fallen into the difficult zone.’ She meant the ‘informer-type’ zone – not that I was an informer. It was that miscellany territory where, like the informer, you’re not accepted, you’re not admired, you’re not respected, not by one side, not by the other side, not by anybody, not even really by yourself. In my case though, seems I’d fallen into the difficult zone not only because I wouldn’t tell my life to others, or because of my numbance, or because of my suspiciousness of questions. What was also being held against me was that I wasn’t seen as the clean girlfriend, as in, he didn’t have other attachments. He did have other attachments. One was his wife. So I was the upstart, the little Frenchwoman, the arriviste, the hussy.
And then it is so much more as Dr Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado shares in her brilliant essay in the Dublin Review of Books Gender in Conflict where she describes Anna Burns writing as exploring “the impact in Northern Ireland of a level of violence that has become ordinary and has turned into the cultural norm” in particular that gendered violence is everywhere and unacknowledged.
Burns’ use of surrealism is a highly effective method whereby the author defamiliarises dominant (and often misrepresentative) narratives of the conflict and its legacy that circulate within the media and popular culture. The surrealist mode allows her to represent the psychological effects of trauma – registering what she calls “the feeling reality, rather than necessarily what happened”
“In an unstoppable torrent of words, she gives voice to the women who endured unspeakable violence during the Troubles, making a powerful and necessary feminist intervention into the literary legacy of the conflict.” Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado
It’s an original, thought-provoking, cathartic read that stays with you long after reading, it puts the reader in total sympathy with the character of middle sister and creates a feeling of there being no way out, seeing her almost as the anti-hero for succeeding at least in losing herself through literature and a foreign language, gone momentarily from this nightmare, despite never being safe from the ever-present unwanted attention.
Highly recommended, if you want a more literary read and insight into the difficulty of living within a fraught political community.
The Author
Anna Burns was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1962. She is the author of two novels, No Bones and Little Constructions, and of the novella, Mostly Hero. In 2001 she won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted
for the 2002 Orange Prize for Fiction. She lives in East Sussex, England.
Word by Word 
My copy of this arrived this week:)
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Yes, I ordered mine as soon as the result was announced and it took a few days, but already had Man Booker winner on the cover, impressive! Happy to support a talented writer, I hope it gets widely read. Look forward to your thoughts eventually.
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Wow this is the second review I have read of this today. I am really looking forward to reading this one now. My book group have mentioned reading this, so I think it could be our January read. Brilliant review, I really love the quotes you have pulled out too.
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Thanks, I just read Jackie’s review now too and loved it, I’ve read some excellent reviews by people who have knowledge of living in that environment and I find them so interesting and insightful as well.
I love that Jackie mentioned that being a stream of consciousness read, it should be slowly digested. It’s interesting to look back over parts of it too, I know the judges all gained much by reading it a second and third time. Thanks Ali for your kind comments.
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Great review Claire 🙂 I’m thinking of trying the Marlon James now- absolutely loved his novel ‘The Book of Night Women’. To me a challenging style is part and parcel of being a Man Booker winner so I’m glad Milkman was recognised.
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I have Night Women on the shelf and can’t wait to read that one, I think I might even prefer it, with the female characters, even if they are tragic. Have to read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God? That has a unique incantatory prose style, and was unputdownable for me. Another one where the prose carries you away in that kind of manner is Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother. Check out my reviews if either of those tempt you, Kincaid’s was my One Outstanding Read of the Year in 2015, just stunning.
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Honestly Night Women was such a satisfying read, definitely one of my favourites from this year. There’s a full review on my blog also! I have heard of Their Eyes Were Watching God but been too nervous to read it- it’s very heavy going subject matter right?
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So great to hear that, I just love Caribbean literature, especially by women, I think you might like it too, especially if you like a touch of magic realism, as many of them use that, it seems to come in naturally from the culture, so doesn’t feel contrived, totally believable for this reader!
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Great review, Claire. Thanks to you, I’m adding this one to my to be read list.
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Thanks Joanne, it really is one that deserves being read by all, despite the challenge of its unique style.
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Even though I haven’t been reading very many contemporary novels of late, I am intrigued by this book and the responses it has evoked. A work colleague is reading it at the moment, and so far so good. I’m glad to see you were impressed with it!
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Fantastic review Claire – I really enjoyed Milkman. It is viciously real about life in Northern Ireland during the Troubles but I also found it very funny.
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Wonderful review! And it reminds me that I really need to read A Brief History of Seven Killings which I never got around to, but which I’ve heard such great things about.
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Super review Claire. I have this on order from the library and am looking forward to it. I had heard that the dialect made for difficult reading, but that does not mean one should not try, or that one cannot benefit from a rich reading experience.
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I do believe readers will be rewarded for persevering with this one Liz.
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I’m absolutely loving it!
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Your sentence
” I am in awe. It is no easy read, for it is written in a kind of double, triple speak, depicting a life and set of circumstances that is constantly in check, a circumventing of self. It describes from the inside how one young woman navigates daily life in a community that has drawn so many convoluted, coded lines of behaviour, that lives by so many unspoken, rigidly enforced violent rules, that has morphed into something so far from authenticity, that only the very ‘different’, appear able to, or indeed risk, living life true unto themselves, except those who left the country forever, their tale not told here, those that got away. ”
touched something in me, I am of those who got away, never to come back…
Thank you for your great review, Claire 🙂 I have Milkman and will read it soon 💗
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Wow Sylvie, it’s interesting to go back and reread that, it becomes so universal doesn’t it, so many leave home to escape this, some go further than others, as even another town in one’s own country often isn’t far enough.
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Hi Claire, I wanted to add it does not matter where one lives, having lived in a rich, beautiful Principality, the rules were rigidly enforced, behaviour was of the utmost importance, in all facets of life. For a child this was detrimental to the core. I left for the US. Looking back at myself, so young, with this driving force to be myself, I ask was this me? Yes!
I mentioned to you how I miss my home, I do, the beauty, the many small and tiny places so filled with this beauty, you live in one of my favorite little towns 💗. Being so young I needed to put as much distance between them and myself and landed in San Francisco.this
Hypothetically, with maturity earned in the later years, I sometimes wish I had taken the bus down the coast, stopping in Eze or thereby.
Thank you Claire for hearing me out, your review so touched me.
I wonder how the author managed to delve so deeply into such a subject.
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It’s so interesting to read this Sylvie in the context of my most recent read, which is set in Ireland, a memoir, how many of those women left their country and travelled far to get away from enforced codes of ‘so called’ moral behaviour that were especially stringent on women, yet who miss all the beautiful aspects of their homeland, she who is innocent of judgement. It is humans who create this architecture of domination, or containment as they’re referrring to it in Ireland.
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Thank you Claire, my mother was from a strict American Irish background….interesting.
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She married my dad a French man, hence why she lived in France/Monaco.
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Reblogged this on ArmedWithCoffee.com and commented:
A re-blog.
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Excellent review of a very complex book, Claire.
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