Finished Milkman

I finally finished Anna Burns' Man-Booker Prize-winning novel Milkman.

It's a masterpiece; it's fun and dense and challenging, and it captures the sense of violence hanging over every interaction. It takes place in 1980 Belfast, but never really tells the specifics. Conformity was out of mortal necessity in most cases, and for the random people who fail to conform, as long as they weren't outright killed, they'd be labeled "beyond the pale," which was a fate nearly equal to death.

The book has been called "experimental" by some critics. Paragraphs can run multiple pages, dialogue between characters doesn't break up those paragraphs, and characters don't have names as such. The main character and narrator is eighteen year-old middle sister. Other characters who populate the story are maybe boyfriend, a mechanic and possible hoarder; wee sisters, middle sister's three youngest sisters; second brother-in-law, a gross side character and small antagonist; and the forty-something paramilitary who's taken a shine in middle sister, the eponymous milkman. In this zone of this segregated community, the paramilitary fighters are folk heroes, and rumors can lead to death quite easily. 

Rumors about the relationship between middle-sister and milkman start to overtake her world, no matter how false they are or how impossible it is for her to stop them.

Ms. Burns writes in the past tense and makes clear early, as in the first sentence of the book, what the ultimate fate of the milkman is, but middle sister's ability to have the perspective of a character at least thirty years older adds to a sense of peace at the end of the maelstrom. 

I marveled at the sentence structure, and the ways some of the narrative was presented. I grabbed two sentences to give a sense of that structure and what some critics complained about. Other critics mentioned that if the author was male, whatever difficulties, perceived or otherwise, would have been called signs of genius.

The first sentence is from early in the book, and is a microcosm for the whole concept. Just to dispel ignorance, a balaclava is basically a ski-mask.

"It was that people were quick to point fingers, to judge, to add on even in peaceful times, so it would be hard to fathom fingers not getting pointed and words not being added, also being judged in these turbulent times, resulting too, not in having your feelings hurt upon discovering others talking about you, as in having individuals in balaclavas and Halloween masks, guns at the ready, turning up in the middle of the night at your door." (page 28)

The second sentence here is from far later, and sums up much of the conflict between middle sister and maybe boyfriend, and about how being unable or unwilling to fully disclose as much info as possible can have dire consequences.

"And it now seemed these rumours were converging, with his viewpoint shifting from 'my not wanting him to call because I was ashamed of him' to 'not wanting him to call because I was in a relationship with Milkman', and my viewpoint shifting from 'not wanting him to call because of ma demanding marriage and babies' to 'not wanting him to call in case Milkman took his life'." (Page 282)

There's just so much good here. The realities of teenagers and rumors and death all around; the way the neighborhood gets spooked out by a "regular" murder, since political murders happen with alarming frequency; how a part of the city is just known as "the ten-minute area," as in it takes ten minutes to cross and no one likes to spend any time there and just hurry through, and people call it such when estimating arrival times, as in "I'll be there in fifteen and ten minutes."

The reward is real. The book is a classic.