Winner of the Man Booker Prize “Everything about this novel rings true. . . . Original, funny, disarmingly oblique and unique.”–The Guardian In an unnamed city, middle sister stands out for the wrong reasons. She reads while walking, for one. And she has been taking French night classes downtown. So when a local paramilitary known as the milkman begins pursuing her, she suddenly becomes … her, she suddenly becomes “interesting,” the last thing she ever wanted to be. Despite middle sister’s attempts to avoid him–and to keep her mother from finding out about her maybe-boyfriend–rumors spread and the threat of violence lingers. Milkman is a story of the way inaction can have enormous repercussions, in a time when the wrong flag, wrong religion, or even a sunset can be subversive. Told with ferocious energy and sly, wicked humor, Milkman establishes Anna Burns as one of the most consequential voices of our day.
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“The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a ‘cat’ and threaten to shoot me was the same day the Milkman died.”
Milkman is the story told by a young woman living in a city in Northern Ireland in the 1970’s. She has a peculiar habit which sets her apart from the others: she reads while she walks. Her preference is for historical fiction as she’d rather be in some other century than her own. She reads as she walks to work. She reads as she walks to her French language night class. She reads as she walks everywhere.
And somehow, when a terrorist named “The Milkman” begins stalking her, her family and friends blame her situation on her habit of reading while walking.
The story is told like a fairy tale with feathery poetic language. The people and places in the unnamed protagonist’s life are identified by their function: Almost Maybe Boyfriend, Milkman, The Real Milkman, Tablets Girl, Shining Girl, the Holy Women, the Problem Women, the people across the road, the place across the border, the place across the water. My favorite are The Three Wee Sisters, the storyteller’s younger sisters who are impossibly precocious, a bit bossy, speak in one voice, and don’t seem adversely effected by their environment.
Like a fairy tale, this story tells of many dark things and horrific things: stalking, common-place violence, suicide, mental illness, layers and layers of laws and rules (those from across the water, those from the resisters, those from the state, those from the church) and the strange ways the community copes.
I listened to the audio performed by Bríd Brennan, easily one of the best audiobooks I’ve ever heard. Her accent is understandable to my American ear. Her voice has a bedside-story charm that enhances the novel. Her characterizations are subtle but distinct.
An amazing achievement. Reading this book is like falling backwards into a stream and being swept along on a wave of gloriously funny, unique prose. The voice is exquisite — fresh, bitingly smart, poignant. You feel as though you’ve been allowed into a parallel universe that feels more real than the world we live in. Somehow Anna Burns manages to write a story that is truly of our time but with a mythical quality. And my goodness, it is also so funny. The description of trying to stay goodbye on the phone, for example: … “after which, they said goodbye which took another five minutes because kind people here, not used to phones, not trustful of them either, didn’t want to be rude or abrasive by hanging up after just one goodbye in case the other’s leave-taking was still travelling its way, with a delay, over the airwaves towards them. Therefore, owing to phone etiquette, there was lots of ‘Bye’, ‘Bye’, ‘Goodbye, son-in-law’, ‘Goodbye, mother-in-law’, ‘Goodbye’, ‘Goodbye’, ‘Bye’, ‘Bye’ with each person’s ear still at the earpiece as they bent their body over, inching the receiver ever and ever closer on each goodbye to the rest of the phone.”
Stunning language. Internal monologue sweeps you into the world of a small town in the time of The Troubles.
Writers need to read good literature. Currently I’ve just finished reading Milkman, Anna Burns’ novel that won last year’s Man Booker Prize.
It has a totally original prose style. None of the characters is given a first name. The narrator, an eighteen-year-old Northern Irishwoman, is called “middle sister.” Her distant father had so much difficulty remembering all his children’s names that he took to addressing them simply as “son” and “daughter,” and the children imitated him. This habit is extended to “maybe-boyfriend,” “Nuclear boy” (obsessed with a nuclear Armageddon), his elder brother “Somebody McSomebody,” and “milkman,” a paramilitary who takes an unwelcome interest in middle sister.
Middle sister doesn’t want anyone taking an interest in her, as this can mean big trouble in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. In fact whenever she walks anywhere she reads a book. Because knowledge “meant the opposite of power, safety and relief,” she reads books to avoid knowing what’s happening around her. This in itself is a reversal of why most of us read books.
But it is her style of writing that most surprises. Her “wee sisters” display an extraordinary, improbable vocabulary, for example when questioning their mother about menstruation (that they have not yet experienced). They ask about “the degeneration of the corpus luteum” and “the shedding of the endometrium.”
Similarly middle sister’s French teacher speaks like an eighteenth-century character in a novel. After her students insist that the sky is always blue, their teacher makes them look at the sunset (shown on the cover): “Your unease, even your temporary unhingement, dear students, in the face of this sunset is encouraging.” Reality is a threat to everyone in middle sister’s world.
Of course Anna Burns is aware that no-one speaks like this teacher these days. But in the Northern Ireland of her novel everyone adopts some kind of cover from the threat of violence. What emerges is a society suffering from collective amnesia. The America of my forthcoming novel, Money Matters, shows a similar society where instead the acquisition of money acts as a defense against the real world.
The voice alone makes this book a winner: the pace is so fast, the voice is so powerful, the politics are so big, but also so personal, that readers who want a book to grab them and work seamlessly on multiple levels will be caught up in the urgency, wit, and warmth of Anna Burn’s 2018 Booker Prize winning experimental novel, Milkman. Told from the perspective of ‘Middle Sister’ the story presents a vision of Northern Ireland during the Troubles–from its injustices and gossip to its hypocrisies and rape culture–through the perspective of an adolescent girl who wants to keep her mother from discovering her ‘maybe-boyfriend,’ who reads when walking, who tries to keep the horrors of the present out of her mind by only reading pre-20th c literature. There are always reasons to keep secrets when you’re 18, but the reasons can be changed utterly given the setting. The book is an amazing read and [I hate to say it, but it’s really true!] unique in how it’s simultaneously a coming-of-age story and a picture of how life was lived in Northern Ireland when nothing could be named (but where here everything is), in how it has digressions that are pages long, but never seems to lose the point, in how it invents words that should clearly have already existed. I’ve never experienced the movement from the personal to the public so intensely–and this is in significant part because of the writing–in any novel I’ve read.
Another of my top 10 reads in the first half of 2019 (by writers I don’t know well enough to invite to dinner): Milkman by Anna Burns. Has there ever been a voice so lush, complex, darkly comic and horrible in the story it tells? Here is a young woman whose freedoms diminish day by day due to the malevolence of a stranger’s need for attention—the milkman—and the town gossip that turns victim blaming pale by comparison. Unforgettable. Writers: a great book to study for voice, repetition, quiet but deadly power dynamics, place in terms of its politics, traditions, and people, as well as handling a character forced into passivity.
I appreciated more than loved this book. It’s brilliant, but not an easy read. It finally grabbed me about half-way through, and I found it original, thought-provoking, and often funny.
An exhaustive yet satisfying stream of consciousness novel. Wholly original take on “The Troubles” in Ireland through the eyes of a young woman trying to navigate a life of literature in the midst of madness.
Perhaps it’s a bit cliche to recommend the Man Booker Prize winner but I loved it and think it actually works pretty well read as speculative fiction. I’ve never read anything quite like its depiction of the mental, emotional and social dysfunctions that arise from living in a divided society riven by violence. But it’s also very funny!
The war in Northern Ireland as experienced by a young girl in a small town shows how perpetual armed conflict can scar us and create deformed relationships. It’s scary when war feels like ordinary life.
Amazing and unforgettable book, surprisingly funny considering its grim subject material. I recommend listening to it if possible.
Set in an unnamed city that’s probably Belfast in the 1970s, Milkman follows an unnamed narrator who’s believed by her community to be having an affair with a man known only as ‘the milkman,’ who isn’t actually a milkman.
The nature of the writing style makes this a challenging read but well worth it for the razor-sharp wit and deft characterisation. If you’re keen to read a modern version of Faulkner, Woolf, or Joyce, then this book is for you.
This was my book of the year in 2019.
Would recommend book to those who like thrillers
A complex novel, definitely not to everyone’s taste, and not an easy read. It’s hardly action-packed; its slow moving plot could be summarized in its opening sentence: “The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died”. The novel is written in a slow, stream-of-consciousness, sometimes repetitive style with very long paragraphs and huge chapters. I admit it often put me to sleep after reading only a few pages. So why 4 stars? Where it enthralls is in the voice, and the subtle ironic humor running throughout, and its brilliant depiction of life for an ordinary young woman in a Belfast neighborhood in the 1970’s at the height of the Northern Ireland conflict.
Burns does not explicitly identify Belfast or the time period, and uses very little dialect or non-standard spelling, but the syntax somehow conveys a strong Irish accent throughout. Her unique style includes naming characters only by their relationships (middle sister, third brother-in-law) or nicknames (Milkman, real milkman) and referring only obliquely to “the wrong religion” or the “country over the water”. She conveys the absurdities as well as the terror of living in an urban area ripped apart by sectarian violence, as well as the power of rumor and “public opinion”. It sounds gruesome, but some passages are laugh-aloud funny, and the young protagonist is a strong young woman struggling to define herself and keep out of trouble in this context. The Northern Ireland “Troubles” may be over, but surely many of the same issues must be prevalent today for young women caught in the middle of Sunni-Shiite or Muslim-Hindu conflicts. Well worth the read if you are up for a slow-paced novel that immerses you in the experience.
When picking up a work of fiction to read, the first thing a reader typically does is to scan the description of the book on the back cover, or the front flap if it is a hardcover. Besides reading some of the best reviews that have been left about the book, there is typically also a short blurb or summary about the book’s content. And since fiction books tell a story, we are expecting the main character’s name to be written down. This is, quite simply, an unspoken rule about what the back of the book is supposed to reveal to its reader. However, when a reader picks up Anna Burns’ Milkman for the first time, he or she is rewarded by being confused from the first glance, as no names pop off the page, begging to be memorized and imagined about. Instead, this summary only mentions characters such as “middle sister” and “maybe-boyfriend,” and opening the book to a random page is likely to reveal the words “beyond-the-pale.” Of course, this ambiguity is enough to draw in any book-lover, as deviating from the norm will always catch the attention of a seasoned novel-reader. Book lovers of all kinds will also be curious about how Anna Burns manages to write 348 pages without ever mentioning a person’s name. The answer, of course, can be found when the reader opens the first page and enters middle sister’s world.
While not all of Burns’s books feature a world full of nameless characters, certain elements indicate her distinctive style of writing. Reviews of her 2014 book Mostly Hero again cite her ability to stand out as extraordinary compared to other fiction authors, a no mean feat with all of the books being published these days. The opening line of Milkman gives an indication of the pattern the book may potentially follow: “The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died,” which basically gives away everything that will eventually happen in the book, but the author’s path to reach the end is what makes her book so unique (1). Her dark humor and little witticisms are also mentioned, and appear to be a big part of her two other books, Little Construction and No Bones. No Bones was put on the shortlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2002, and was the author’s debut novel. Of course, in terms of popularity, these other three books pale in comparison to Milkman after it won the Man Booker Prize in 2018. The Booker Prize is the one of the most prestigious awards for a book written in the English language, so Milkman is obviously the most known book by Anna Burns, which does not mean that her other books are not worth reading. Of course, many people, including myself, may not get around to reading her other books, as many readers put their trust in books with the most critical acclaim.
Now that the Man Booker Prize has been given a proper shout out (no, they sadly did not sponsor the writing of this review), we can finally find out what a beyond-the-pale is (see first paragraph). Basically, a beyond-the-pale is someone who has been “earmarked some freak-weirdo person” in middle sister’s community (200). Often, there are certain actions a person does that cause the rumors to start up about them, and these rumors are numerous: “It’s disturbing. It’s deviant. It’s optical illusional. Not public-spirited. Not self-preservation. Calls attention to itself and why – with enemies at the door, with the community under siege, with us all having to pull together – would anyone want to call attention to themselves here?” (200). Besides simply being seen as a weirdo, a beyond-the-pale is potentially putting themselves in grave danger, as Milkman takes place in Northern Ireland during the Troubles of the 1970s, a time rife with political struggles. The exact setting of the book is never explicitly mentioned, but context clues and knowledge of the author’s history can safely let the reader know that this community is indeed under siege. This excerpt from Milkman is characteristic of the rest of the book with its choppy style and short sentences. Another common feature of the author’s writing is her ability to go on a ten to twenty page tangent based on a random thought from middle sister’s brain. This is part of what makes the book more of a challenging read than most; the lack of names and the many different people who she talks about also ensures a more difficult read. Since this book strictly follows the thoughts of middle sister, it makes sense that many of the context clues that are normally provided in a book are not discussed, as it feels as though we are truly in the brain of another person. Of course, when we are just thinking about our days and reflecting on past experiences, we do not give context clues to an unknown audience, as that may qualify us for a stay in a mental hospital. As such, discovering the true setting of the book can be a bit of a challenge, and we also have to rely on her name dropping of “current” celebrities to understand the time period, such as “the Pankhursts, Millicent Fawcett, Emily Davison, Ida Bell Wells, Florence Nightingale, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harriet Tubman, Mariana Pineda, Marie Curie, Lucy Stone, [and] Dolly Parton” (157). These names all serve to conjure up certain images in our minds and become even more striking because they are actual proper nouns instead of “middle sister” or “third brother-in-law.”
Besides name-dropping all of these famous women (read the book to find out why), middle sister mentions some other proper nouns: book titles. “The Brothers Karamazov, Tristam Shandy, Vanity Fair, [and] Madame Bovary” are all brought up to identify middle sister’s peculiar reading habits, which she does while walking (17). Middle sister enjoys reading these books because they were published in the nineteenth century rather than reading works written in her current century. One could argue that this habit of reading nineteenth century literature while walking is what catalyzes all the other events of the novel, but middle sister herself would probably disagree with that assessment. Many of the events of the novel are a direct result of the characters living during the Troubles, and seeks to show how ordinary people living in their community deal with these struggles.
This book will push the reader to think outside the box. It will raise questions for the reader about how to look at the world around them and push the boundaries of the imagination. And if the reader of this review found it confusing and tangential and choppy, but also enjoyable, then head over to the local bookstore or library and start reading Milkman by Anna Burns to see if this review is truly accurate in its assessment.
Great book. Enchanting lead character.
I loved this endearingly frenetic stream-of-conscious tale. For me, the author unveils how ‘group-think’ can possess and hold back a community, and women, in a completely original novel.
There’s a reason this won the Mann Booker Prize.