Pushing the possibilities
Bookseller and reviewer Kiran Dass reads the latest Man Booker winner and considers the impact of award-winning books on readers
“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.” So opens Milkman, the beguiling novel by Anna Burns which won the 2018 Man Booker Prize and made Burns the first Northern Irish writer to do so.
This stunningly atmospheric novel, which has nabbed one of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes will polarise readers. But that’s what I love about it. It’s not a middling, peoplepleasing, delightfully easy read that you’ll forget about as soon as you’ve finished it.
Milkman is interesting; it has bite, an edge, a backbone and it will get under your skin.
With its almost stream-of-consciousness fluid style and few paragraph breaks, it has also prompted a discussion about what shape and form a novel can take.
The Milkman in question isn’t really a milkman. “I didn’t know whose milkman he was. He wasn’t our milkman. I don’t think he was anybody’s,” she says. He’s a terrifying and menacing middle-aged senior paramilitary figure; a domineering figure of power, violence and status pursuing our unnamed 18-year-old narrator, who is known only as Middle sister.
Milkman is set in an unnamed Northern Ireland town we assume to be Belfast amid The Troubles, which feels prescient and makes
Milkman read like a cautionary novel of the current post-Brexit era, further heightened by themes of #MeToo and gender relations.
When Middle sister attracts the unwanted attention of the Milkman, who intimidates and stalks her, word is spread throughout the town that she is having an affair with the much older man. The violence is insidious. Middle sister says that she has been led to believe that if there is no physical violence and no overt verbal insults, it doesn’t count as abuse. She has no understanding of what constitutes encroachment.
With a mordant wit and humour, one of
Milkman’s strengths is the distinctive and strong internal voice of Middle sister. Her inner world is strikingly activated. And in her external world, everything is politically divided and freighted with political significance: there’s the right butter, the wrong butter. The tea of allegiance, the tea of betrayal. There are “our shops” and “their shops”. It’s very clear that in this world, you create a political statement everywhere you go. The feeling of implied violence and tribalism in a psycho-political atmosphere is powerfully evoked.
From a bookseller’s perspective, one of the interesting things about the Man Booker Prize every year is watching how it opens audiences up to new authors and styles they might not otherwise take a punt on. Much has been made of Milkman being a “difficult” read (nonsense, I say. Once you plug yourself into it, you’re in the zone and on a roll) and I’ve found it thrilling seeing people depart from the usual reading habits and try something different.
Literary prizes like the Man Booker and the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards are great drivers of book sales. The day the Man Booker winner is announced, there is a lively and feverish quality to the shop floor as droves of people pop in to check out the novel as soon as the winner is known. This, of course, often causes suppliers and distributors a headache as they scramble for enough stock to supply hungry booksellers, the anxiousness of the in-demand title going out of stock.
In addition to the Man Booker, the literary prizes I always look to with interest are the Goldsmiths Prize, the National Books Award and the Pulitzer. Milkman is a refreshing choice as the Booker winner as it’s the kind of novel that would typically fit in the Goldsmiths — a prize which acknowledges and celebrates works of fiction which push the possibilities of the form of the novel.
There were two welcome surprises this year in the Man Booker longlist, which doesn’t usually tend to be inclusive of genre fiction — the graphic novel Sabrina by Nick Drnaso and a fairly bogstandard straight crime novel, Snap by Belinda Bauer.
But a lot of what makes the cut depends on who the judges are and when you look at this year’s judges, it makes sense: Crime writer Val McDermid and artist, illustrator and graphic novelist Leanne Shapton were on board.
Interestingly, the shortlist bypassed the bestselling titles in the UK from the longlist (Normal People and Snap) so by picking Milkman judges were not necessarily going in for readability or sales.
Awards are contentious things, though; everyone has an opinion on what is deemed a worthy winner. To be honest, despite knowing who I think ought to win, I can never really pick who will win. I was annoyed and surprised that Olivia Laing’s brilliant Crudo wasn’t even longlisted and that Sally Rooney’s excellent Normal People — my novel of the year — was longlisted but not shortlisted.
Of course, I know a lot of people loved it but, while I loved his short story collection Tenth of December and his non-fiction, I’m still annoyed that George Saunders won the Booker last year for his preposterous novel Lincoln in the Bardo.
I actually hated that book so much I threw it across the room and I am not typically a violent person.
Looking closer to home, the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize as part of the Ockham’s will be a nail-biter as 2018 has been a superb year for New Zealand fiction. My picks? Anne Kennedy’s The Ice Shelf, Fiona Kidman’s This Mortal Boy and Kate Duignan’s The New Ships. But only one book can win; we’ll find out which next year.