USA TODAY International Edition
‘Milkman’ delivers gripping story of life in wartime
The 18-year-old woman who narrates Anna Burns’ dark, piercing novel “Milkman” (Graywolf Press, 360 pp., just wants to mind her own business.
Read a book while walking home, or catch a sunset with the guy she’s kindasorta seeing. But she’s in a time and place where minding one’s own business is all but impossible.
Burns’ novel, winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize in Britain, is now being published in the U.S. It’s set in the 1970s and inspired by the Troubles, which for decades consumed Burns’ native Northern Ireland with sectarian violence. That conflict – over Northern Ireland’s relationship with the United Kingdom, and stoked by religious divisions – goes unnamed, as does the narrator. That makes the book less historical fiction than an allegorical tale on how life in a war zone short-circuits our capacity to speak and think clearly.
“These were paranoid times. These were knife-edge times, primal times, with everybody suspicious of everybody,” the narrator explains.
The atmosphere turns every abnormality, however slight, into a target for surveillance and scrutiny. The narrator’s walks catch the attention of Milkman, a so-called paramilitary “renouncer” (akin to the Irish Republican Army that opposed British rule), who has an unsettling depth of knowledge about this young woman. Her “maybe-boyfriend” who she’d rather spend time with is eyed as a traitor merely for owning a car part bearing the flag of the nation “over the water” (read: England). Birth names, family ties, even pantry contents can raise eyebrows: “The right butter. The wrong butter. The tea of allegiance. The tea of betrayal.”
Burns keeps the violent consequences of all this – the bombings and knee-cappings – largely to the side. Instead, she focuses on the psychological impact of the second-guessing, where even taking somebody to the hospital becomes fraught with political calculus. That can make “Milkman” a difficult novel to find a foothold in: The narrator can be digressive and repetitive. But once Burns’ purpose becomes clear, her style powerfully evokes the narrator’s sense of emotional entrapment.
The plot turns on the young woman’s efforts to escape Milkman’s stubborn attentions. Her neighborhood quickly assumes they’re an item, and she’s embraced by tough-willed girlfriends of other renouncers. (Her reputation makes her so feared at one point that a crowded fast-food restaurant comically clears out when she steps inside.)
Burns’ novel is a lament for the violence that has affected everyone in the narrator’s life. It is strongest in its attention to the way factionalism blasts away nuance and self-expression. In a revealing moment, the narrator’s French class is terrified of describing a sky as anything but blue. To think otherwise “meant anything could be any color, that anything could be anything, that anything could happen, at any time, in any place, in the whole of the world, and to anybody . ... A colorful sky, just like that, could not be allowed to be.”
“Milkman” makes a passionate claim for free thinking in a place where monochromatic, us-versus-them ideology prevails.