Milkman

Milkman, by Anna Burns, is a polarizing book. It won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Novel, but got panned by Dwight Garner in the New York Times and has a string of one-star reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. Naturally, I fall right into the middle on it. I find it equally brilliant and incomprehensible.

The book almost deliberately tries to push you away and confuse you. For starters, no one is referred to by name. The narrator is a 19-year-old girl who is never named. She refers to others by a title, rather than a name, such as "second brother-in-law," "maybe-boyfriend," or "longest friend." The location and time period are also obfuscated. I expect that it's England, as there are references to a country "over the water" that sounds like the United States: "‘I don’t know what we’re coming to,’ said ma, and yes, definitely she was worried. ‘We’re turning into that country “over the water”. Anything happens there. Ordinary murders happen there. Loose morals happen there. People marry there, have affairs, but their spouses don’t care about these affairs because they’re having their own affairs also – so why get married? They don’t say why they got married. Then they get divorced, or don’t bother getting divorced but instead just marry their own children. Then they have children by their children. Then they abduct other children. You can’t walk out your door over there but you’re falling over sex crimes.’"

As for time period, it seems to be in the present, except phones are described as being placed on hooks and there are references to famous people from various time periods, such as Leo Sayer or Virginia Mayo. Then there are implications that this is in the future, with references to paramilitary and "renouncers" and people being killed by both factions: "Before Milkman, they had shot a binman, two busdrivers, a road sweeper, a real milkman who was our milkman, then another person who didn’t have any blue-collar or service-industry connections – all in mistake for Milkman. Then they shot Milkman. Then they played down the mistaken shootings while playing up the intended shooting, as if it had been Milkman and only Milkman they had shot all along."

Milkman is a man who is stalking our narrator, and everyone thinks that they are having an affair. But he is not a real milkman: "I didn’t know whose milkman he was. He wasn’t our milkman. I don’t think he was anybody’s. He didn’t take milk orders. There was no milk about him. He didn’t ever deliver milk. Also, he didn’t drive a milk lorry. Instead he drove cars, different cars, often flash cars, though he himself was not flashy." To further confuse things, there is a character called real milkman, who actually is a milkman.

I'm not sure what Burns is after here. Is this an allegory, or a commentary on modern times, or just a free association ramble through a girl's mind? It's told in a stream of consciousness that occasionally comes up with a sentence of gold but other times drones on for paragraphs that last for pages without making any sense. I loved passages like these, that exhaust the thesaurus: "She meant depressions, for da had had them: big, massive, scudding, whopping, black-cloud, infectious, crow, raven, jackdaw, coffin-upon-coffin, catacomb-upon-catacomb, skeletons-upon-skulls-upon-bones crawling along the ground to the grave type of depressions." She even offers such homely asides as how cats are different from dogs: "Cats are not adoring like dogs. They don’t care. They can never be relied upon to shore up a human ego. They go their way, do their thing, are not subservient and will never apologise. No one has ever come across a cat apologising and if a cat did, it would patently be obvious it was not being sincere."

But throughout Milkman there is a sense of menace. Clearly these people are living in dangerous times, when they can be killed at any time. Our narrator gets poisoned, by someone called Tablets Girl (I'm not sure why) and then Tablets Girl has her throat cut. Our girl is also stalked by a boy she calls Somebody McSomebody, and in the first sentence of the book lays out the picture: "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."

Those who prefer to have their stories laid out clean and simple will not cater to Milkman. I don't mind an occasional struggle, but I must admit that there were times when pages went by and I had no idea what I was reading. So beware.