Milkman

I'm rewriting my review after further immersing myself in this book for a second and third read, including listening to an audio version, and discussing it with my book group.

I absolutely love this book...it is one of the best I have ever read. In addition to being a near perfect novel with a great plot, engaging characters, including the narrator middle-sister who grows up as the story plays out, Burns creates a chilling, dark and dystopian setting. I'm not sure exactly how she does it, since there is not much physical description of landscape or the place where the action is located. I'm guessing it's down to her unique and experimental writing. Long blocks of text, with run on sentences that often made me go back to their starts because I had forgotten them by the time I got to the ends, reflect both the breathless quality of a teenage girl's thoughts as she travels into adulthood, and the anxiety of a community paralyzed by fear. There are strong messages about that fear, about totalitarianism, and about both the oppression and resilience of women, but it is not a political screed pretending to be a novel. It works expertly in all of the ways that a novel should.

Burns' characters are nameless and described by relationships: middle-sister, third brother-in-law, wee sisters. They live in an unidentified place, presumably Belfast in the 70s, where male paramilitaries or "renouncers" have manipulated the people to their will with violence, propaganda and lies, and by oppressing women. 18 year old middle-sister, criticized by her neighbors for reading-while-walking (she loves nineteenth century novels), struggles to keep her distance from the community, but is challenged when a powerful paramilitary man, the milkman, starts stalking her. It is a story of her fight to fend off the milkman, as well as the gossip and lies spread about her, to maintain her independence as a woman and not be treated as a sex object and property of the paramilitary.

Scattered throughout this dystopia idiosyncratic, often sidesplitting humor relieves an otherwise dark world: "Under stress we were starting to fight and were communicating less with each other than the normal amount of sharing of ourselves that we didn't tend to communicate before."

For me, this is a tale of what happens when a radical, usually male, individual or group subverts a community, state, or country to their own narrow agenda. People, especially women, who otherwise were living ordinary lives, working and/or raising families are propagandized, bribed or forced into going along, and in the process some of them become monsters.

But there is hope in the darkness. Women come together again and again to meet their oppressors in unusual ways. They attack and beat Somebody McSomebody for daring to enter the women's room at a local club. They protect feminists by joining them in the street, making it impossible for the paramilitaries to distinguish protestors from the other women in the community. They save a local man who is well liked from death by beating back his tormentors. Best of all is the joy of the wee sisters who, dressed in the silks and ruffles and fancy dresses of their older sisters and mothers, dance in the streets with their friends, celebrating a local couple who has made it good in the international dance world.

Burns writes unlike any author I've ever read. The writing is dense, with an archaic quality that's a challenge to read, but that suits the book's anxious atmosphere and its aim of universality perfectly. It also works well in its audio format, read by an Irish woman who knows just where to pause in the interminable sentences and makes the writing accessible. I predict this masterful book will be a classic. I couldn't put it down.

Here are seven reasons to read this book:
1. The writing style is really something special. The most noticeable aspect is that (almost) none of the characters have names, they are always referred to by their relationship to the protagonist. I liked that a lot for the simple reason that I am someone who always has great difficulty remembering what the names of all the characters are in a book and this book removes that problem nicely. It is of course the author probably didn't do this purely to help out people like me but it is also a nice literary device for emphasizing that in the situation the main character finds herself in, she is often reduced to only being something in relation to other people.
2. The plot is gripping and unpredictable. Some novels are too much just plot-driven (some rubbish thrillers for example) and others have no plot, so that with nothing happening it just gets boring, but this one was just right; enough plot to drive it, but more to it than that.
3. The first-person perspective is very nicely done. Everything is from her point of view, which means that we miss a lot of information. Just enough to keep the suspense up.
4. It is very specific to a particular time and space, but with universal significance.
5. It explains something of what it must have been like to live through the Troubles. In the seventies, when that was going on in the North of Ireland, I was living 'over the water' in England and of course we heard all about the bombings and killings, the tarring and feathering, the hatred and suspicion and when I was older I got to know some people from there. However, of course we got a filtered version of what went on and a different filter was very interesting.
6. From time to time it is very amusing.
7. It explains the feminist perspective that the way women are treated is to do with the power structures in society; not by lecturing but by story-telling.

Nice quote: "No one has ever come across a cat apologizing and if a cat did, it would patently be obvious that it was not sincere".

Fantastic!

Wow, what an interesting, unique and intelligent book! I can see why it won the Man Booker Prize. While not really told "stream of consciousness", from the point of view of an older woman writing about her late teens in some unnamed place (but almost certainly Belfast or somewhere very much like it) during some unnamed time (but almost certainly during The Troubles). Even the narrator is unnamed, as well as most of the people in it.

The story of the girl is told as if the narrator is repeating the tale into a tape recorder. It skips around in fascinating ways, with digressions that are both interesting and dramatic. The writing does require some work, as it rambles in a unique fashion, but I found it very refreshing. The story looped around a few times, but it was often funny and always interesting. I particularly liked when she talked about her precocious "wee sisters" (her 3 younger sisters).

Highly recommended!