The past is not such a foreign country when it is brought back darkly to life
This year’s Booker winner captures forensically that sense of a community watching and judging, writes Eilis O’Hanlon
APHOTOGRAPH was needed to publicise my first novel, so I went to have it taken standing on waste ground in Belfast’s nationalist Ardoyne district wearing a white Union Jack T shirt, purely for mischief.
That was the early 2000s, but even then I remember thinking: “For God’s sake, man, get a move on. I’m sticking out like a sore thumb here.” There was a time not long before that when doing so at all would have been impossible. There’s an incident in Milkman, the novel by Ardoyne-born Anna Burns which last week became the first by a Northern Irish writer to win the Booker Prize, in which the narrator’s “maybe-boyfriend”, a car mechanic, brings home part of the engine of a classic Blower Bentley racing car, only for a local republican headcase to make trouble for him because this particular car traditionally had that contentious red, white and blue flag on the side of the door.
The emblem is not even on the bit of machine the young man brings home, but it’s enough for him to be noticed and found suspect in that “great Seventies hatred” in which Burns’s novel is set. It was not a place, or time, when drawing attention to yourself was a particularly good idea.
It wasn’t possible back then to say or do certain things “without ruffling or embarrassing or frightening local people”. There were too many “rules of allegiance, of tribal identification, of what was allowed and not allowed”. As Burns says: “You created a political statement everywhere you went, and with everything you did, even if you didn’t want to.” It’s this authenticity that is so compelling.
It’s hard to explain to people who weren’t there, but Burns gets closer than anyone has ever done to the awful claustrophobia that clung to Belfast during the Troubles, though the city itself is never named. Reading it, I kept being drawn back to my own growing up there. Partly because it’s set in the working class North Belfast that I know so well, with its narrow streets, barracks, drinking clubs, “ghost shops”, and people; there are certain streets she writes about that I don’t recognise, because they’re too specific to Ardoyne and I came from the other side of the Waterworks — the slightly scary (at least at that time) park where so much of the pivotal events take place — but nationalists and loyalists alike will recognise that world, because we all lived in different versions of it. You’d have to be mad to feel nostalgia for it, but that doesn’t mean you can forget it either. Burns clearly never has, though she’s lived in England now for years. Even when you leave it, it never leaves you.
The Troubles inflicted a collective mental trauma on those who lived through them, crafted out of “years of personal and communal suffering... overladen with heaviness and grief and fear and anger”. It burrows under your skin, and the urge to scratch it is a constant temptation. Burns captures forensically that sense of a community watching and judging. There’s stubbornness, unforgivingness, secrecy. There are the fathers, “brooding, obsessive”, poring over their newspapers and news programmes for every scrap of information of the political situation; in our house, six o’clock was a sacred time, and the silence had better not be broken until the news was heard and digested. Mothers seemed to derive the same solace from religion, worrying meanwhile not so much about their daughters’ virtue as their long-term worth as commodities in a thankless, constricted social landscape should they carelessly lose it.
It’s in this world that the narrator of this book, a teenage girl, comes to the attention of the titular Milkman, a fortysomething paramilitary with connections of some sort to the fighting, though no one’s sure exactly what they are.
He has his sights set on her, and keeps intruding on her privacy, and then people start to talk, as people did pathologically at that time, though she does nothing to encourage this dangerous man’s attentions. Her response to the existential threat to her well being is, of course, to say nothing, because “not mentioning was my way to keep safe”. That’s so true. Keeping to yourself was the best way out of trouble.
An extreme reticence was hard-wired into everyone at that time. I still recognise it in myself to this day. Whatever you say, say nothing. Milkman’s narrator “asked no questions, answered no questions, gave no confirmation, no refutation”. Northern Ireland back then was a place where, if you didn’t have boundaries, people would come barging in, “because of the twisting of words, the fabrication of words, and the exaggeration of words that went on in this place”.
The narrator of the book copes by reading 19th Century novels, because she doesn’t like the 20th, and her habit of doing so whilst walking along, head down, deliberately oblivious, is what marks her RECOGNITION: The Duchess of Cornwall (top left) presents The Man Booker Prize for Fiction to Anna Burns at the Guildhall in London out as suspect. It’s not that she doesn’t share or understand the tribal allegiances. She does. She just wants to be left alone. Burns’s unpicking of a toxic world that made such a small request risky is so excruciatingly accurate that it’s sometimes too hard to bear. She rummages around inside your memory because she knows exactly what’s in there.
Journalists are simple creatures. They need hooks on which to hang books. Since winning the Booker last Tuesday, Milkman has been co-opted by some as a warning against a return to a hard border post-Brexit.
That strikes me as almost insultingly facile. In fact, it would be a cracking idea right now if everyone, British or Irish, Leaver or Remainer, Taoiseach or jobbing pundit, would stop using Northern Ireland as their plaything. Some of these people mean well, and some of them don’t; but their interventions when it comes to Brexit and the border feel exploitative, cynical.
The book has also been claimed as a useful text to the #MeToo movement, and that feels much more germane. The voices of the North, from strident politicians to literary sages, have mainly been male. Women’s voices were drowned out. Burns’s centring of the feminine and domestic against the pain of the Troubles feels radical and timely.
The society of which Burns writes was one in which brutish men felt entitled to intrude on women’s personal space, and the fact that some women in that world — “groupies”, the narrator calls them — were attracted to the power and viciousness of certain men who had the status that came from being “involved” in no way excuses the intrusion, nor the tyranny of being made to feel foolish if you complained. If you weren’t being physically touched, it was thought, “then nothing was happening”.
“Why was he presuming I didn’t mind him beside me when I did mind him beside me?” this girl notes early on. “Why could I just not tell this man to leave me alone?”
What’s wrong is that, at 18, this girl has “no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment”. All she has is “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 a right not to like, not to have to put up with, anybody and everybody coming near.” The words are haunted by what’s now known about the sexual exploitation of women and children by paramilitaries during the conflict; but it’s a universal female experience too, badgered by the drip, drip of low-level harassment and worse. To complain too loudly, or refuse to defer to male superiority, risked being branded as a “female way- ward, a species insolent and far too sure of herself ”.
The #MeToo movement has plenty to say about all that as well. Even if the social and political peculiarities may be of less interest to outsiders than to those who lived through them, and can’t forget, Milkman is disturbingly relevant.
‘Women are badgered by the drip, drip of low level harassment’