Anna Burns became the first Northern Irish writer to win the Man Booker Prize when her third novel, Milkman, took the honor in 2018. It’s an experimental novel, atypical for Booker winners, that reads like a more accessible Faulkner, and combines a story of the Troubles with the staunchly feminist narrative of its 18-year-old narrator for a result that is unlike anything I’ve read before.
Characters in Milkman go without names, including the narrator, a young woman who walks around with her head in a book and is literally and figuratively oblivious to the internecine warfare occurring around her, as well as the titular milkman – well, both milkmen. The milkman of the title isn’t actually a milkman, but rides around in a white van as if he were one. He’s in his 40s, associated with a local paramilitary group, and stalks the narrator while ensuring that everyone in their tightknit, gossip-ridden community knows that she is his, to the point where others, including her own mother, assume that she’s indeed having an affair with this dangerous, older man. There’s also a real milkman, whose role becomes apparent as the novel progresses; ‘maybe boyfriend,’ whom the narrator has been seeing for a year, who’s obsessed with cars, and whose life may be endangered by not-really Milkman; Tablets girl, who runs around poisoning people, including her own sister and eventually the narrator, but everyone seems to just take it as part of life; the boy the narrator calls Somebody McSomebody, who also tries to threaten the narrator into becoming his girl, which ends rather poorly for him in one of the novel’s few scenes of actual violence; and far more.
Burns layers a story of personal terror inside a story of the societal terror that affected Northern Ireland for decades. The narrator’s life is turned upside down by this unwanted attention from a man she barely even knows, but whose reputation in the community is enough to scare her and to convince everyone else she’s submitted to him willingly (even though she never submits to him at all). When the Milkman stalks her, he also inducts her, against her will, into a theater of the absurd that mirrors reality from that time and place, where violence split Catholics and Protestants, where any official authority was seen as essentially Ours or Theirs, where an act that shouldn’t merit a second thought, like going to the hospital, would be fraught with political and social implications. She’s suddenly seen to have taken sides, and even finds herself the unwitting beneficiary of the fear others have of the paramilitaries, which further underlines for her how potent the impact of this one man’s attentions towards her are.
Burns also surrounds her narrator with families who’ve been hurt by the violence in the community, directly or indirectly, including the one mother who, by the end of the novel, seems to have lost her husband and every one of her children to direct violence, related accidents, or suicide. The narrator’s father is dead when the novel opens, while her mother is a tragicomic figure who is convinced her daughter is a sinner, who believes every rumor she hears about her daughter (some from ‘first brother-in-law,’ who is both a gossip-monger and a creep), and who goes into hysterics over every bit of innuendo, which the narrator never wants to even acknowledge because it merely prolongs the agony.
Milkman is still quite funny and even hopeful in parts among the litter of tragedies and the ever-present specter of the stalker, although we do learn at the start of the novel that he’ll die before it’s over. The narrator’s third brother-in-law, while a peculiar man himself, takes on a protector role over his young sister-in-law, as does Real Milkman, whose interest in her is a side effect of his romantic interest in her mother. There are also signs of intelligent life amidst the gossips and harridans, including the “issue women,” a group of seven residents who embrace feminism when one hears of it in town and starts up a local women’s group in the backyard shed of one of the members (because her husband wouldn’t allow it in the house).
I’ve only read a few of the contenders for this year’s Booker but can at least understand why this novel won. It also feels like the third straight year where the prize has gone to a novel that does something different, as opposed to the prize’s history of going to literary works that still adhere to the traditional form and intentions of the novel. I could imagine this novel seeming abstruse to readers outside of the UK, given its setting during the Troubles, but that’s merely the backdrop for a rich, textured story that is as relevant today (with its #MeToo similarities) as it would be to a reader of that time and place.
Next up: A little light reading, Albert Camus’ The Plague.