"Milkman" by Anna Burns

Winner of the 2018 Booker Prize; shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. 

This is a portrait of a society distorted by sectarian division, described through the strange and sometimes bizarre experiences of the characters who have been warped and buckled by the way their lives have had to adapt to their damaged environment. One might guess where and when it is supposed to be but the city is unnamed, as is the narrator, as are the characters. This story can be applied to anyone, anywhere, at any time. 

It is a world where gossip and rumour reign supreme, to the extent that one is judged not by what one is or even what one does, but what is said to have done. In this world your life, even your self image, can be controlled by what other people think. The narrator's big failing is, as she is told: "You are not inferable. You cannot be deduced - and they don't like that." (Ch 5) Because 'they' cannot understand her, therefore they make up stories about her. Thus the narrator is treated as though she is the girlfriend of Milkman, even though for most of the book she does her best to avoid him. Because of what she is supposed to be she is applauded, reproved, threatened, and almost killed. Other characters are also not what they are supposed to be. Chef isn't a chef, though he does like cooking. Milkman isn't a milkman but real milkman is. Nigel and Jason aren't called Nigel and Jason. 

The only character who truly knows everything there is to know about everyone is the omniscient Milkman, a bogeyman who pops up from time to time, always unexpectedly, and disappears without warning. I wondered whether he was intended to be real, or a fantasy created by the beliefs of the inhabitants of the city; perhaps he was meant to be God. And yet the first sentence of the book tells us that he has died. Perhaps he has. 

It is a world created by the distorted perceptions of its inhabitants. There is a wonderful scene in chapter 3 when the French teacher tells his class of adult learners that the sky isn't only blue but many colours and they refuse to believe it, some of them even when he has them staring at a sunset. The narrator reflects: "there were sunsets every day ... we weren't meant to be coffined and buried while all the time still living". This acts as a brilliant metaphor for the selective blindness that can be caused by ideological bigotry.

It is a world peopled by gloriously eccentric characters, including:

• Protagonist-Narrator: she runs, she walks and she reads nineteenth century literature as she is walking. She is more or less in the middle of a family of three boys, seven girls, a mother and a dead father. 
• Maybe-boyfriend: a car mechanic and hoarder who lives on his own in a house with four bedrooms, his mum and dad having abandoned their four sons to become champion ballroom dancers touring the world and his three elder brothers having moved out. 
• First brother-in-law: nosy and interfering but also creepily over-friendly with NP
• Chef: a gay lad full of nervous energy who likes cooking and, while cooking, talks to himself. 
• Third brother-in-law: a runner
• Mother: a religious woman who wants her sixteen year old daughter to get married before it is too late.
• Tablet's girl: a poisoner
• Wee sisters: the three sisters younger than the NP who are intellectual prodigies
• Real milkman aka the man who didn't love anybody
• Somebody McSomebody
• Nuclear boy: despite living between armed renouncers and soldier, his greatest fear is nuclear war

There is a sense of unreality. Even some of the settings are magical, such as the liminal 'ten-minute area' a "bleak, eerie, Marie Celeste little place" (Ch 3), so named because it takes ten minutes to walk through. When First sister, when summoned on the phone at the end of the book, says she will be there in fifteen minutes plus ten minutes, because she has to walk through the ten-minute area.

It is narrated with just the right amount of internal monologue to give the reader a feeling that they are genuinely inside the narrator's head but hardly ever so much as to obstruct the flow of narrative. The structure is loose, almost dream-like, and the chronology regularly loops back and forth in time (the first line isn't resolved until nearly the end of the book). There is very little in the way of plot as such but there is character development. And, bit by bit, we start to learn the inner truth of some of these characters.

Selected quotes:

• "The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the day the milkman died." (Ch 1; first line)
• "This sister was standing in her drainpipes and flip-slops with every toenail painted a different colour. ... She had a glass of Bushmills in one hand and a glass of Bacardi in the other." (Ch 2)
• "In our area there existed two types of mental aberrations: the slight, communally accepted ones and the not-so-slight, beyond-the-pale ones." (Ch 2)
• "Da had ... big, massive, scudding, whopping, black-cloud. infectious, crow, raven, jackdaw, coffin-upon-coffin, catacomb-upon-catacomb, skeletons-upon-skulls-upon-bones crawling along the ground to the grave types of depressions." (Ch 3)
• "With da it was never 'Must get down on knees and give thanks that others in the world are suffering far worse than me.' I couldn't see how he couldn't be right too, because everybody knew life didn't work like that. If life worked like that then all of us - except the person agreed upon to have the most misfortune in the world - would be happy, yet most people I knew weren't happy." (Ch 3)
• "No one has ever come across a cat apologising and if a cat did, it would patently be obvious it was not being sincere." (Ch 3)
• "What if she was wrong about ... moving on to next chapters? What of the next chapter was the same as this chapter, as had been the last chapter? What if all the chapters stayed the same or even, as time went on, got worse?" (Ch 3)
• "Not a case of being unable to face reality. More a case, I'd say, of getting out the magnifying glass and having a good gawp at it." (Ch 3)
• "They have this idea, these people, that you're stupid, that you're incapable of discerning that they think you stupid. Also they don't see you as a person but instead as some cipher, some valueless nobody whose sole objective is to reflect back on them the glory of themselves." (Ch 3)
• "I'd strike them as a textbook, some kind of log table - as in correct, but not really right either." (Ch 4)
• "People can be extraordinarily slipshod whenever already they have made up their minds." (Ch 4)
• "Along with the district poisoner, the poisoner's sister, the boy who killed himself over America and Russia, the women with the issues, and real milkman, also known as the man who didn't love anybody. I too, was one of those intemperate, socially outlawed beyond-the-pales." (Ch 4)
• "Are you saying it's okay for him to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read Jane Eyre in public?" (Ch 4)
• "My knowledge of the world consisted of fucking hell, fucking hell, fucking hell, which didn't lend itself to detail, the detail really being those words themselves." (Ch 5)

A wonderful portrait of a dysfunctional society. May 2024; 348 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God