The best friend of the unnamed narrator of Anna Burns’s third novel, “Milkman” (Graywolf), the winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize, sits her down in a night club to address some behavior. The narrator has alienated their neighbors in an equally unnamed, obviously Northern Irish city sometime in the late nineteen-seventies, with the Troubles in full fury. “It’s disturbing,” the friend explains. “It’s deviant. It’s optical illusional. Not public-spirited. Not self-preservation. Calls attention to itself and why—with enemies at the door, with the community under siege, with all of us having to pull together—would anyone want to call attention to themselves here?” She must stop it, and she must stop it now. The deplorable conduct in question consists of reading books while walking down the street.
“Milkman”—told in an unspooling, digressive, and fretfully ruminative manner that bears a rough semblance to stream of consciousness but is much easier to follow—is set in an urban war zone where carrying around plastic explosives seems less aberrant than using the sidewalk as a study. Yet the conflict that most preoccupies this novel flares not between republicans and loyalists or between Catholics and Protestants—Burns, who grew up in North Belfast, uses vague aliases like “renouncers” and “the opposite religion” to take the edge off the novel’s historical specificity—but between the girl and her community. Like so many such insular, embattled enclaves, her “area,” as she often refers to it, is suffocating and inescapable. The characters go nameless, identified only by their relationships to one another. There’s “first brother-in-law,” a rumor-spreading creep; “third sister,” who seems to spend most of her time getting sloshed with her girlfriends; “maybe-boyfriend,” with whom the narrator enjoys a wary intimacy; “ma,” who is Ma and therefore won’t stop nagging her about getting married and producing babies; and the narrator herself, called “middle sister.”
Middle sister’s best friend has a point. So complete is our narrator’s rejection of her surroundings that she sticks to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature: “I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century.” You can’t really blame her, though. The paramilitary renouncers who effectively run her district have degenerated into quasi-gangs, turning up in Halloween masks and balaclavas to appropriate residents’ belongings “for the good of the cause and the defence of the area.” The police, serving the interests of the “country ‘over the water,’” are even worse; at one point, they slit the throats of the neighborhood dogs. “The only time you’d call the police in my area,” middle sister explains, “would be if you were going to shoot them, and naturally they would know this and so wouldn’t come.” The sick or the injured think twice about going to the hospital, because any involvement with the authorities could lead to being forced to turn informant—or just appearing to have been turned—and “either way sooner or later, courtesy of the renouncers, your corpse would be the latest to be found up an entry with a tenner in its hand and the bullets in its head.” But what bothers middle sister most, what she finds hardest to elude, is the “intense nosiness about everybody,” which, of course, preëxisted all of that. Everyone’s behavior is monitored for lapses in respectability, not just the politically dubious but also “certain girls” who cannot be “tolerated if it was deemed they did not defer to males, did not acknowledge the superiority of males, might even go so far as almost to contradict males, basically, the female wayward, a species insolent and far too sure of herself.”
Seething with black humor and adolescent anger at the adult world and its brutal absurdities, “Milkman” wedges itself too deeply in middle sister’s psyche to resemble a wandering city novel like “Ulysses.” Instead, the way that Burns’s clauses trace the switchbacking self-consciousness of social life in her community recalls the mental torments that often seize David Foster Wallace’s characters: “Just as most people here chose not to say what they meant in order to protect themselves, they could also, at certain moments when they knew their mind was being read, learn to present their topmost mental level to those who were reading it whilst in the undergrowth of their consciousness, inform themselves privately of what their true thinking was about.” A novelist can get lost in such labyrinths, but the saving grace of “Milkman” is a tensile story line involving the title character, a forty-one-year-old married local who’s reputed to be a major player in the paramilitary groups. He starts turning up when middle sister is walking (and reading) or running in the park. He offers her rides, displays detailed knowledge of her routine, and eventually begins to make conversation by suggesting that maybe-boyfriend might have an unfortunate run-in with a car bomb in the near future.
The source of this man’s moniker baffles middle sister: “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.” Soon she realizes that he intends to take complete possession of her. The sinister delicacy of this campaign—the milkman never touches her and rarely looks directly at her during their encounters—weaves through the novel, keeping it from meandering too far off into its narrative byways. Middle sister’s perspective makes the milkman’s “encroachment” seem terrifying, implacable, and yet frustratingly foggy. In her “hair-trigger society,” she explains, “if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn’t there?” As far as the neighborhood scandalmongers are concerned, however, she’s been spotted talking to him in the street once or twice and must therefore already be his mistress. Everyone in the novel seems intent on wearing middle sister down, jamming her into a mold that makes more sense to the community—I.R.A. moll, adulterous hussy—than does a girl who reads while she walks. Her response is to clam up, presenting “a terminal face—nothing in it, nothing behind it, a well-turned-out nothing” that “I thought would bemuse the gossips, confound them.”
The voice that Burns conjures for middle sister fits a personality still under construction, cobbled together from bits of books, eavesdropped adult conversations, children’s lore, and a stubborn fumbling toward her own, hard-won understanding. Middle sister’s self is coherent in its incoherence, as is often the case with smart teen-agers who are out of step with their environment. Her diction can be gawky (“My distrust had been phenomenal to the point where I could not see that probably there had existed individuals who could have helped, who might have supported and comforted me”), and then can vault into a terse, bitter lyricism, especially on the subject of how every aspect of her world has been politicized: “The right butter. The wrong butter. The tea of allegiance. The tea of betrayal.” The novel’s story is told from a perspective sometime in the future, a time that middle sister calls “the era of psychological enlightenment,” in which she has a better grasp of how the milkman, her ma, her neighbors, the paramilitaries, and the state itself conspired to crush her. What she comes to realize, too late, is that “I’d been an active player, a contributing element, a major componential in the downfall of myself.”
Middle sister claims not to pay attention to “the problems,” but she absorbs them anyway, “because of osmosis.” Tribalism has supercharged her area’s native intrusiveness to the degree that when maybe-boyfriend, who buries himself in an infatuation with automobiles, obtains a highly desirable chunk of a Bentley Blower race car, his loyalty comes into question for the mere suspicion that he has the part with “that flag” on it. Burns doesn’t belabor the point, but it parallels the scrutiny imposed on the neighborhood’s women in general, and on young women in particular. Hers is an entire society subjected to the kind of minute social policing ordinarily reserved for teen-age girls. Both regimes conspire to stifle any spark of independent selfhood; what matters isn’t who you are but how you appear, and the tiniest transgression can be fatal. Worst of all, the ambient paranoia penetrates even those who are determined to resist it, like middle sister herself. She presents as a familiar figure: the skeptical teen-age narrator dismantling the phoniness around her. But there are chinks in her defiance, failures of will and memory that echo the self-defeating political excesses of her neighbors. It’s not as if there were no alternatives in sight. Among the area’s “beyond-the-pale” residents are the scoffed-at “issue women,” a small band of fledgling feminists who might have come to middle sister’s aid if she could have brought herself to ask. But even she dreads the taint of “beyond” status, of being “branded a psychological misfit and slotted out there with those other misfits on the rim.” The milkman may resolve to break her, but the cracks have formed even before he shows up.
For a novel about life under multifarious forms of totalitarian control—political, gendered, sectarian, communal—“Milkman” can be charmingly wry. Surveying the car-parts-strewn home of maybe-boyfriend, middle sister muses, “If we were in a proper relationship and I did live with him and was officially committed to him, first thing I would have to do would be to leave.” Fetching minor characters keep bubbling up, including a brother-in-law who, in parody of a certain strain of Celtic romanticism, “expected women to be doughty, inspirational, even mythical, supernatural figures”; a wannabe chef who mutters instructions to an imaginary kitchen assistant; a middle-aged couple who are “always taking themselves off unannounced, successfully to compete in ruthless, to-the-death ballroom-dancing competitions”; and “wee sisters,” a precocious threesome, the youngest of middle sister’s siblings, who attract recruiters from a “child-genius academy” and prattle on about Egyptology and the second law of thermodynamics. As middle sister observes, there is “underneath the trauma and the darkness a normality trying to happen.” It just needs someone willing to fight for it.♦
