Anna Burns, Milkman

- This Man Booker winner is an exceptionally good and satisfying read. 

- The setting is the Troubles in Belfast in the 1970’s - Catholics and Protestants are in a violent civil war. The IRA paramilitaries and the occupying British forces are murdering and bombing each other, and civilians (informants and ‘renouncers’ included) are always suspects and casualties. It’s an ugly place. 

- Nothing is named however. Not the city, not the country. Even England is simply ‘that place over the water’. Likewise, the characters are not named. The narrator is ‘middle-sister’. 

- This works so well in universalising the themes - the suffocating, gossiping, provincial political/social ghettos corrosive of good and loving relationships; the religious, conservative, family small-mindedness; the all-pervasive surveillance state; the emerging and soon to be powerful feminist movement (women who have ‘issues’) naming the imprisoning, oppressive and poisoning patriarchy - dominant themes in an 18 year old woman's painful experience of coping in a rotten society.

- She has been accused of the crime of ‘reading while walking’ because she devours literary classics as she walks the neighbourhood, and ‘in our type of environment it presents you as a stubborn, perverse character’.

- This a hard read and barely 10% of readers will get beyond the first 70 or so pages I’d hazard a guess. Great slabs of page after page prose, long paragraphs, no section breaks, 50 page chapters, densely typeset. It's formidable.

- However it sucked me in. It’s frequently tedious, strange, and frustrating, but it’s also mesmerising and an intellectually powerful critique of a savage, totalitarian, all controlling patriarchy. 

- It’s also often humorous, which is engaging, and the dialogue is always rich, intelligent and verbose in that stereotypical Irish, Joycean way. And all the characters, educated or not, speak in the same style and tone. The girl’s ‘ma’ and ‘da’ are opinionated, loquacious and delightful. As is ‘maybe-boyfriend’, his friend ‘chef’, middle-sister’s ‘longest friend’, and the ‘real’ milkman (his trade not surname) who is later revealed as ma’s ‘ex-boyfriend’ and possibly new one.

- The narrative constantly introduces characters and events that initially seem to make little sense, like ‘tablets girl’, a poisoner, and her half-blind sister, but gradually what meaning is being suggested starts to become clear. 

- The predatory ‘Milkman’ (his surname not trade) may be an insignificant individual but he symbolises a class of men and the social realities they have constructed - stalking, sleazy, powerful, dangerous, not to be associated with (echoes of Harvey Weinstein). The title of this book is Milkman (the surname not the trade). That is significant. 

- Slowly but surely a detailed picture of meaningful human relationships in a society under immense pressure emerges. A tapestry is being woven that gets richer and richer as the book progresses. The victory goes to those few with integrity and the courage to fight for their rightful place. Middle-sister is one of them.

- Anna Burns has written a stunningly good, profound and utterly original novel. Highly recommended.