Milkman by Anna Burns won the Booker Prize last year, so automatically, it went into my TBR list, and I ordered it as soon as it was available on Amazon.
Once it came home, it sat unread in all its pink gloriousness on my bookshelf for the better part of six months.
Why? I read two paragraphs and then realized it was written stream of consciousness style. If I ever had to name a writing style I cannot abide by, it’s a stream of consciousness.
This summer, however, I decided to somehow push through the book. I had already given up on George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (another Booker prize winner) and didn’t want to ditch Milkman too.
So how did I find the book? Surprisingly good once I got over the format. In fact, it might just go down as one of my favorite books of the year.
Milkman book synopsis
In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumors start to swell, middle sister becomes ‘interesting’. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous.
~ Synopsis from goodreads
My Review
Can I call this novel brilliant and end my review with that? No?
Well, then, let me list some of the things I really loved about Milkman.
Unnamed middle sister narrator
I loved how Anna Burns took me right into an 18-year-old’s head and had me sympathizing and relating with her so much. I just loved middle sister so much!
Who cannot love a girl who reads books while walking around town? This used to be something I would do around her age (also, eating while reading a book – something I still do today).
Are you saying it’s okay for him to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read ‘Jane Eyre’ in public?
I completely sympathized with middle sister during all her struggles. I don’t find it easy to relate to teenage characters these days (growing old 🙁 ), but middle sister was just note-perfect. Anna Burns totally captures the growing up pangs of a teenage girl back in the days when there was no internet or mobile phones.
When Milkman starts stalking her, the poor innocent doesn’t know how to react. And even though I don’t have her experience of living in a violent society, her reaction was something so relatable for me personally. I too, have been catcalled and left frozen, unsure whether I was overreacting to nothing.
At the time, age eighteen, having been brought up in a hair-trigger society where the ground rules were – 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? At eighteen I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment.
The stream-of-consciousness style
Wait, what! Wasn’t this my most disliked format? Turns out, when it’s done well, it quite works for me. I think in the case of Milkman; it helped that I could so closely identify with the protagonist. It also helps that she’s intelligent, witty, and funny.
Here she voices the thoughts of the IRA, who want to get rid of a group of pestilential feminists:
To shoot up a district of women, children, prams and goldfish otherwise, to run them through with swords much as one might like to, would not look good, would look grave, sexist, unbalanced, not only in the glare of the critical side of the home media, but also in the eyes of the international media
This book is full of black humor. It pokes fun at all the horrifying things that were simply the way of life in 1970s Belfast at the height of the IRA troubles. Not that this book ever references the time and the place. The time, place and people are all left unnamed. It’s up to the reader to fill in the blanks.
Global nature of the book
Because Burns does not specify the time, place, or names, a book about a girl in 1970s Ireland instantly becomes a global book. This could be just about any dystopian society (quite scary when you think about it). Also, middle sister’s problems (and I keep coming back to her, she’s so crucial to the success of this book) are global and universal among all women. At its core, this book is a coming-of-age tale of a young woman trying to find her way, and become herself in a world constantly obstructing her.
And which woman cannot relate to that?
So, is this book difficult?
Yes, it is. No two questions about that. The style is dense and unsettling – with long run-on sentences and chapters spanning 40-50 pages. But it is also compelling. Once I got into middle sister’s headspace, I couldn’t stop reading.
Mind you; it took over 200 pages to get into that headspace.
But take the time and make the effort. This book’s worth it.
I listened to the audiobook format of Milkman, and found that it alleviated the issue of stream of consciousness style writing. Plus, the narration by Brid Brennan was awesome! Really liked the book.
Yes, I think this would be pretty awesome as an audiobook!