Milkman

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. He had been shot by one of the state hit squads and I did not care about the shooting of this man. Others did care though, and some were those who, in the parlance, ‘knew me to see but not to speak to’ and I was being talked about because there was a rumour started by them, or more likely by first brother-in-law, that I had been having an affair with this milkman and that I was eighteen and he was forty-one. I knew his age, not because he got shot and it was given by the media, but because there had been talk before this, for months before the shooting, by these people of the rumour, that forty-one and eighteen was disgusting, that twenty-three years' difference was disgusting, that he was married and not to be fooled by me for there were plenty of quiet, unnoticeable people who took a bit of watching. It had been my fault, too, it seemed, this affair with the milkman. But I had not been having an affair with the milkman.

Thus begins Anna Burns' Milkman, now shortlisted for 2018's Man Booker Prize, and this bit quite neatly introduces the book's two main themes: Set in a Catholic enclave of 1970's Belfast, not only is life dangerous for the community's men – doomed to early deaths by armed confrontations with government agents or taken out as collaborators by their own people – but the gossip-based social control exercised over and by the area's women (with the attending consequence-free sexual harassment of them by the community's own men) made life rather dangerous for them as well. Growing up in this atmosphere, the unnamed narrator (pretty much every character is unnamed but for nicknames like “third sister”, “longest friend”, or “almost one year maybe-boyfriend”; used by the narrator even when speaking directly to these other characters) is emotionally “closed-up”; rambling and circling around ideas, repeating the same things over and over, creating this claustrophobic and walled-off narrative space that frankly bored and annoyed me. I think I get what Burns was trying to do, how she was trying to demonstrate the mental stress on those who lived through the Troubles, and I do tend to be interested in books that push my comfort zone, but this really didn't work for me; I wouldn't be interested in reading anything like this again.

In those days then, impossible it was not to be closed-up because closed-upness was everywhere: closings in our community, closings in their community, the state here closed, the government 'over there' closed, the newspapers and radio and television closed because no information could be forthcoming that wouldn't be perceived by at least one party to be a distortion of the truth. When it got down to it, although people spoke of ordinariness, there really wasn't ordinariness because moderation itself had spun out of control. No matter the reservations held then – as to methods and morals and about the various groupings that came into operation or which from the outset already had been in operation; no matter too, that for us, in our community, on 'our side of the road', the government here was the enemy, and the police here was the enemy, and the government 'over there' was the enemy, and the soldiers from 'over there' were the enemy, and the defender-paramilitaries from 'over the road' were the enemy and, by extension – thanks to suspicions and history and paranoia – the hospital, the electricity board, the gas board, the water board, the school board, telephone people and anybody wearing a uniform or garments easily to be mistaken for uniforms also were the enemy, and where we were viewed in our turn by our enemies as the enemy – in those dark days, which were the extreme of days, if we hadn't had the renouncers as our underground buffer between us and this overwhelming and combined enemy, who else, in all the world, would we have had?

As long as this second passage seems, that paragraph begins a full three pages earlier – and while I'm sure that the exhaustingly long and tightly typed pages, with even longer chapters that give no mental breaks, are meant to give a sense of the relentlessness of the mental stress of our narrator, this book's main effect on me was to make me sleepy; not only was I never looking forward to picking it up again, but I couldn't sit with it for very long without my head nodding. So, in addition to telling us and telling us about the people from “across the road”, and “across the border”, and “across the water”, along with the renouncers and the informants and the others on “our side of the road”, etc., Milkman has the barest of plots: Our narrator is eighteen years old, and under constant pressure from her widowed mother to get married and push out elevenish children of her own, she has been having a clandestine relationship with a young motor mechanic for nearly a year. We learn that it's dangerous to marry someone you actually love (because you're sure to lose him too soon to car bombs, prison, etc.), that it's possible to grow up in this community without ever noticing the sunset, and out of all the levels of pariahdom, it is most “beyond the pale” to be the sort of girl, as is our narrator, who would walk along the streets reading eighteenth century literature. When the mysterious Milkman (not “the real milkman”, “Milkman” isn't even a milkman) begins to stalk the narrator, not only does the entire community (including her own mother) begin to shame her for having an affair with the married man, but as scared as she is of the milkman, she also realises that there's an inevitability to her being taken by him if he desires it.

'Mark our words,' said people, and again all this made sense within the context of our intricately coiled, overly secretive, hyper-gossipy, puritanical yet indecent, totalitarian district. But out of context, away from all that itchiness, the whispering, the passing of notes and where an unhealthy interest in sexual matters existed to the extent of sexual dirt being the most best for general gossip whenever you wanted a rest from political gossip, it would have been difficult to gauge how all these locals were arriving at the most detailed of information regarding me and him that they were. Their creative imaginings would reach my ears slander by gravitational slander. Then there were those other occasions when the more direct line of communication was attempted, such as when they'd chase me down to havoc me with questions, this time up close face-to-face.

I included what feels like overlong quotes to give a sense of what I didn't like about the writing, but there were also some oddly funny bits that saved this from a two star rating for me (I did especially like the narrator's trio of “wee sisters” and their precocious questions and nonsecretive nosiness; it's a little sad to think that the narrator and her older sisters might all have once been that bright and shiny). The biggest failing for me was that I made zero emotional connection with this book – bored, exhausted, and annoyed was what I primarily felt.

Man Booker Longlist 2018:

Snap by Belinda Bauer

Milkman by Anna Burns

Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

In Our Mad And Furious City by Guy Gunaratne

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

Normal People by Sally Rooney

From A Low And Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan

I just barely squeaked in reading the Man Booker Prize shortlist this year - after having to order half the titles from England - and I really don't know if any of them stand out to me as "a real Booker winner to stand the test of time". In order purely of my own reading enjoyment, I'd rank the shortlist:

The Long Take
Washington Black
The Mars Room
Everything Under
The Overstory
Milkman 

* The prize was eventually won by Milkman, my least favourite of the shortlist, so what do I know? *