One of the oddest, most impenetrable novels ever to win the Man Booker
Hulme’s The Bone People in 1985. Not only is it not the best book on the shortlist, it’s not even the best book on the longlist where Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight cast its spectral magic and Sally Rooney’s Normal People told a love story that had critics swooning.
Set in Northern Ireland, during the Troubles, Burns’s experimental novel is narrated by an 18-year-old girl who finds herself pursued by a sinister, much older, paramilitary figure – the Milkman of the title. Burns writes in long, stream-of-consciousness paragraphs and there are no names to help the reader navigate or get their bearings. Our narrator is known as “middle sister”; other characters are “third brother-in-law” or “first brother-in-law”(good luck with telling the difference) and there is the welcome, chirpy presence of carobsessed “maybe-boyfriend”.
Chairman of the judges, Kwame Anthony Appiah, said: “None of us has ever read anything like it before.” Which is strange as you would hope those paid to assess one of the world’s biggest literary prizes would have a working knowledge of two other rather well-known Irish writers, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Burns certainly belongs in the school of Joyce and Beckett, although not yet in their class. You might say “middle sister” is Molly Bloom with bombs.
I consider myself to be a rather good and passionate reader, but Milkman is undeniably hard work. Appiah acknowledged as much when he admitted the book is a challenge, “but in the way a walk up Snowdon is challenging”. You can’t see that appearing on one of those staff endorsement cards in Waterstone’s, can you? “Really quite enjoyable if you like ascending a Welsh mountain in driving rain and mist. Pack a kagoule and Kendal Mint Cake!” Pity the poor booksellers.
Appiah’s contention that Milkman “is enormously rewarding if you persist with it” sounds more like homework than literature. You shouldn’t need to persist with a great book; you shouldn’t be able to put it down. As for his suggestion that it might be helpful to sing some of the paragraphs aloud… really? I don’t purchase a novel to do my own audio-book, thanks. The language should make its own music as Roddy Doyle did in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, his glorious Booker winner of 1993. Like Burns, Doyle was working in the headlong, harum-scarum humour of Irish vernacular, but he opened up that world to outsiders, welcoming us in with a helpless generosity. Milkman, too, has wonderful shafts of wit, as when our heroine (God, I wish she had a name!) is mulling over moving in with “maybe-boyfriend”. “If