SueKich's Reviews > Milkman

“Are you saying it’s okay for him to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read Jane Eyre in public?”

The setting is an unnamed but likely Belfast in the dying embers of the seventies when the sectarian violence was at its worst and the reach of the women’s movement was just beginning to make itself felt. Don’t let any of this put you off. Because although this is subject matter that has been covered countless times before, it never to the best of my knowledge been approached quite like this.

Milkman is written in a style I would term ‘stream of thoughtfulness’; that is to say that although the writer is immersed in her inner life, in her milieu, in her misreadings of the situation this does not come across to the reader (or, at least, to this reader) as a conventional stream-of-consciousness narrative and it’s a book that has divided opinion in no uncertain terms, as increasingly seems to be the way with Booker winners. In any event and – much to my surprise – I loved it. (Many thanks to my book buddy who recommended it.)

The humour sneaks up or under, sometimes quite unexpectedly. Here is our 18-year old unnamed narrator discussing her unusual arrangement with her 'maybe-boyfriend' and his hoarding of car parts in the house:

“…I couldn’t bear the cluttered state of ‘Come in and welcome, but you’re going to have to squeeze a little’ during times I stayed over because of the normality of the kitchen and of his bedroom and the half normality of the bathroom. Mainly though, I could bear it because of the ‘maybe’ level of our relationship, meaning I didn’t officially live with him and wasn’t officially committed to him. If we were in a proper relationship and I did live with him and was officially committed to him, the first thing I would have to do would be to leave.”

The ‘traditional women’ doing their version of state defiance by coming out onto the streets with housepets and prams to buck the curfew but “returning home in haste, emptying the streets in seconds, all to get in to get the evening tea on”. Or meeting up in a garden shed with the downtown sister branch but first getting one of their husbands to “go into the shed to deal with the spiders”.

Then there’s the narrator’s mother, so steeped in outdated village values and yet still managing to surprise her daughter (and us!) with her very modern take on the sexual attraction of violence: “fast, breathtaking, fantastically exhilarating rebel-men’.

What is so wonderfully disruptive about Anna Burns is that she manages to achieve such high-level dark satire whilst all the time maintaining deep inside the warm, witty and one might even dare to say delightful blarney of a movie like The Quiet Man with its vintage Irish humour and whimsy. Much as I wanted to bash heads together and point out to our young narrator that opening up is often better than bottling up, I nevertheless found hers a most engaging and unique voice. The ingrained nature of the animosity between the euphemistically entitled “renouncers-of-the-state”, “over the road” and “over the water” has rarely, if ever, been so brilliantly depicted.