Milkman by Anna Burns

“At the time, age eighteen, having been brought up in a hair-trigger society where the ground rules were – if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn’t there? At eighteen, I have no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment.”

Milkman is by no means an easy novel to read, it is sluggish and sprawling, feeling longer than its 352 pages; however, it is hugely satisfying to finish. It also presents a haunting look at life during The Troubles in Northern Ireland – a topic that few English people actually know the history of to an embarrassing degree. Goodreads describes Milkman as ‘a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness.’ Whilst this is an interesting overview of the plot, it fails to mention the extreme misogyny and sexism that exists in its pages.

Anna Burns skilfully creates a world and characters without ever giving anyone a name. Readers are met with references to people such as, ‘maybe-boyfriend’, ‘middle sister’, ‘first brother-in-law’ and of course the famous ‘Milkman’. This technique distances you from the characters in the novel, removing their sense of individuality and uniqueness. Equally, they are transformed into a homogenous group that you never feel like you truly get to know. Likewise, although we know the novel is set during The Troubles, the city in which it is set is also unnamed. Rather than inferring mystery and intrigue, this widespread anonymity actually allows for a high level of monotony and tedium to exist.

The protagonist, also known as ‘middle sister’, becomes the prey of Milkman and this harassment is what much of the novel is based on. Milkman is a renouncer of the state and is high up in the paramilitary group that essentially runs the city – as such, everyone is scared of him. Middle sister stands out from the crowd largely due to her weird habit of walking alone with her face buried in a book, rather than just getting the bus like everyone else. For this she is labelled as being ‘beyond the pale’ and is subsequently victim-blamed for her involvement with Milkman. People don’t care that she is being harassed and stalked by an older, powerful man, as she was the one who made herself stand out in the first place. This novel just further suggests that it doesn’t matter what you wear, or what you do, abuse happens regardless.

There is a creepiness running throughout the novel, enhanced by the lack of names and familiarity granted to readers. Whilst you may attest this creepiness to the novel being set during The Troubles, where state and paramilitary violence was rife, it is not this violence that is so disturbing. Instead, it is the more insidious and silent tribalism, conformism, religion and patriarchy that is widespread across the unnamed city that perturbs. Literal and physical violence is definitely present, but whilst these are horrifying scenes, it is the unnerving sense of not being able to trust anyone, not being able to talk to anyone candidly, and not to be able to walk around in your own hometown freely that is so terrifying to read of.

The Troubles was a conflict in Northern Ireland during the 1960s up until 1998 when the Good Friday Agreement was signed. It was primarily a political and nationalistic conflict. Although the terms ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ were used frequently this was not a religious conflict. Put simply, the conflict was over the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, with Unionists (largely Protestants) wishing Northern Ireland to remain as part of the United Kingdom, and Nationalists (largely Catholics) wanting Northern Ireland to leave the UK and instead become a united Ireland once more.

Many of us have never lived through a war or a conflict on this scale; there are conflicts happening right now across the world, but none in the West. As a result, war is seen as something abstract and distant, making the content of Milkman even more bleak. It highlights exactly what our lives could look like if we were born in a different era, or even just in a different place.

If you can get past the long sentences, lack of paragraphs and lengthy chapters then it is definitely worth it – but if those descriptions put you off then this probably isn’t the book for you. But if you are interested, then this highly unique, stream-of-consciousness style prose will enthral you like no other.

#FLOFavourite: If the nature of this book puts you off, but you are still drawn to the contents then I urge you to check out the audiobook version. I have heard countless glowing reviews of this.

Words by Mollie Kate Cohen