ONE MAN’S ‘SLOG’ IS WHAT MAKES MILKMAN SO GREAT
IWAS just about to tell you what a great book Milkman is, and to register my amazement that the Man Booker judges could have got it so right, when the internet informed me that a review in the New York Times by one Dwight Garner is telling you what a terrible book it is.
And while it is not essentially strange for a great book to get the odd bad review, the strange thing about this one is that the things which I know to be great about Milkman are exactly the things that Garner hates.
The headline says that “Milkman slogs through political and cultural tensions in Northern Ireland”. So it “slogs”, does it? I was just about to tell you that it was indeed taking me some time to get through Milkman because it so beautiful, I keep going back to re-read parts of it — to Garner it is “Interminable”, whereas I was hoping that somehow it would never end.
While I was reading a book which left me in awe of the virtuosity of Anna Burns, this Dwight Garner was struggling with “a wilfully demanding and opaque stream-of-consciousness novel, one that circles and circles its subject matter, like a dog about to sit, while rarely seizing upon any sort of clarity or emotional resonance”.
Now Garner has a right to be wrong, but we really do need to bury this “stream-of-consciousness” thing, because it’s like some horrible little rumour that is somehow becoming a universally accepted fact. Oddly enough Milkman won the Booker 50 years after the making of another Belfast masterpiece, Astral Weeks — and they called that stream-of-consciousness, too.
Some stream, baby! Some consciousness!
But Milkman is no more stream-of-consciousness than any other work of art which flows powerfully from its source. Indeed, when we hear “stream-of-consciousness”, we tend to think of James Joyce writing in a language of his own, one that is not English at all, whereas Milkman is written in a most meticulous style.
Only a stone-cold genius such as Joyce can get away with “stream-of-consciousness” in the true sense, whereas the genius of Burns is of quite a different nature. She is not lashing out some “wilfully demanding” screed, indeed she is going to enormous trouble to draw us into the work with sublime flourishes of wit and the gorgeous eloquence of the language. She is not doing an Eric Morecambe performing Grieg’s Piano Concerto — “playing all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order” — she is playing all the right notes, all the time.
So having missed all these points, you can hardly expect Dwight Garner to be getting the deep politics of it, the way that Burns soars beyond all the hackery and the tribalism we have known on the Troubles, to tell of another secret war — one in which there was no “community” supporting you, to which you owed allegiance, indeed your “community” and its leaders could be your darkest foe.
The Mairia Cahill case officially introduced us to this predatory culture, and we are hearing echoes of it early doors in Milkman: “At 18 I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment. I had a feeling for them, an intuition, a sense of repugnance for some situations and some people, but I did not know intuition and repugnance counted, did not know I had the right not to like, not to have to put up with, anybody and everybody coming near.”
So while I will always have a certain sympathy for any man who takes a hatchet to the winner of the Booker Prize, on general principles, I have to say to Dwight Garner that Milkman is not just another longform application for a professorship — indeed its tremendous sales are suggesting that people have been uplifted by the story of Anna Burns herself and the hardship she went through, to write her book.
Her great, great book.