Reader is the loser with this Man Booker Prize winner
Milkman slogs through political and cultural tensions in Northern Ireland
If you were making a film of Anna Burns’ novel Milkman, the winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize, you’d probably start with a shot of a teenage girl walking beside a busy two-lane road. Notably, the girl carries a book, Martin Chuzzlewit or Tristram Shandy or Madame Bovary. She walks and reads at the same time. When she perambulates at night, she uses a flashlight.
Reading while walking does not win this unnamed girl any friends. Women find her aloof and haughty. “They said I was ungenerous in my facial expression,” she says. She displays, others think, “an unamiable Marie Antoinetteness by being stuck-up, by thinking I was above them”.
Men fear for her safety. This is the 1970s, in what is obviously Northern Ireland, though the place is never named. There are hunger strikes and car bombs and safe houses and men in balaclavas and Halloween masks.
One day a man rolls up beside the girl while she’s walking. He’s a high-ranking political dissident, a thug and a celebrity known as the Milkman. He’s married but he wants her for his own nibbling, as a sexual bibelot.
He pursues her patiently, and spookily. He shows up at her classes and beside her when she goes running. Just being seen with him makes the girl a more intense object of local gossip. People begin to pay her elaborate deference.
When she visits another young man, who is something close to an actual boyfriend, the rumour spreads that she’s cheating on the Milkman. The young man may be in real trouble.
This, loosely, is the plot of Milkman, Burns’ third novel. The narrator, her family and others fear making any sort of cultural or political misstep. Were this an Edna O’Brien production, the action would mostly likely fit into a 20-page short story.
Burns expands this material into 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. I found Milkman to be interminable, and would not recommend it to anyone I liked.
It’s poor form, probably, to insert a long quote this early in a review. Yet this drifting sentence, from Page 114, is representative of Burns’ narrative voice — the repetitions, the piling up of extraneous detail, the dashes within dashes, the sense she instils in her readers of craving verbs the way an animal craves salt:
“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 suspicion 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 a uniform 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?”
T.S. Eliot said of another difficult novel, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936): “Only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.” After Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway and The Sound And The Fury and innumerable other novels, we have eyes for the poetry in a novel like Milkman, but an attentive reader will spend days between stations while searching for it. So many of the passages spin like the one above.
The best thing in Milkman is Burns’ occasionally sensitive portrait of this young woman’s flickering consciousness. She reads only old books; she wants to escape the 20th century and the horrors around her. Books help her remain alive but also remote from her hazardous world, the world not just of politics but of sex. “The truth was dawning on me of how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, be present, be adult.”
She isn’t sure what kind of woman she wants to be, nor what kind of man she desires. The Milkman is all menace and muscle; her almost-boyfriend is too sensitive, too fey.
When she wants to be, Burns is bleakly funny. The narrator reads her much-younger siblings The Exorcist and Doctor Faustus before bed. One character goes to the Middle East to get a bit of peace.
Sometimes her pile-on sentences achieve a prickly, shambolic sort of grace. Here she is on black days: “She meant depressions, for da had had them: 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 type of depressions.”
Burns has a tic as a writer, one that, once you notice it, will begin to drive you mad. She likes groupings of three, that magic number, whether she is dealing out nouns or verbs or adverbs: “illuminating, transcendent, contemplative”; “neglect and disadvantage and disfavour”; “those shudders, those tingles, the horrible sensations”. These troikas are endless. Mostly these extra words are unnecessary, redundant and not needed.
The cultural convention known as the novel can take a lot of pulling and contorting. So can readers. But Milkman requires so much effort for so modest a result.
This is a wilfully demanding and opaque stream-of-consciousness novel. I found it to be interminable, and would not recommend it to anyone I liked