Booker winner reflects long history of Ireland’s love affair with poetry and song
IT’S difficult to be original, funny and furious at the same time, yet this is the remarkable achievement of last year’s Booker Prize winner, Milkman, by Anna Burns, the first writer from Northern Ireland to take this much-coveted prize.
It is an unusually-structured book, set firmly in the fermenting 70s, the time of the “Troubles”, a skirmish of ancient enmities fought in and over on a tiny island that a thousand years ago was a single, sophisticated and cultured country that was shredded through its colonisation by Britain – it’s still the longest-running unbroken struggle in the world and by no means over, as Brexiteer-watchers will be aware.
The novel begins in the same way it continues, a nameless voice of an 18-year-old girl on the cusp of womanhood, living in a traumatised and deeply-divided community somewhere in Northern Ireland. From her flows a steady, unbroken stream of trenchant and intimate observations that are born from her daily, lived experience.
There are no names in the book, including her own, yet the reader quickly learns to distinguish between the many characters.
She is known through her relationship to those around her, as “Middle Sister” or “Almost-Girlfriend”, brought up in a large family amputated by death, assassination and disappearances, blocked from any innovation or modulation through the rigid mores that characterise all societies under pressure.
Take one step outside that circle of what is approved or disapproved and you will pay the price, a social device historically used whether by whole countries, political movements, or small gangs.
Such conformism seals loyalty and obedience, and confirms your identity, assumed to be critical in a community under siege despite the misery it may cause.
At her age, according to her Mam, she should be married with children.
“Middle Sister” wants to make her own quiet choices and pass unnoticed. But she has public flaws, one of which is that she reads books while walking the streets. This is not a “normal” thing to do and is marked as deviant and potentially a danger to her. She is frightened of the man who keeps stalking her, the so-named “Milkman” without any actual job of delivering milk – though there is an actual milkman, a friend of her mother’s.
The novel is driven, at pace, as a single, long narrative voice, with scarcely any paragraphs, let alone chapters.
It is a streamed experience that runs uninterrupted out of the daily challenge of being a young woman who longs to be invisible and yet cannot escape the eagle eye of those who judge and who take harsh decisions which all too often end in tragedy.
The beauty of this book is its richness of language, the wide-ranging vocabulary and musicality and repetition of phrases that reflect the long history of Ireland’s love affair with poetry and song. It will be familiar to anyone who grew up in an Irish home, as I did, but that’s not a requirement, fortunately, for relishing it.
Milkman was the unanimous choice as winner of the Booker; I can well see why.