Reading a novel again …. in a different world.

Milkman Anna Burns Faber 1^st pub 2018

Milkman is a novel about, among many other things, reading. The narrator’s habit of reading as she walks, basically anywhere, and 19^th century novels mostly, is the main crime that she, referred to throughout as middle sister, commits.

Volunteering to present Milkman to a book group was perhaps a mistake; I’d foolishly set myself up as over-enthusiastic. I first read the book a year or so after Anna Burns won the Booker and then readers had been split. ‘It’s a difficult book but worth it’, seemed the consensus. I had loved it, and was convinced that the others in the book group who had not yet read it must feel the same. They had something exceptional ahead of them.

But how did I feel going back to the novel? This time, when bogged down near the end in poison-girl’s sister’s fate, I nearly despaired. How much more?

But it was still a pearl of a novel, I didn’t want to miss out on introducing it to new readers, have it left permanently unopened on the shelf or in Oxfam. And once I’d finished it, I was back to feeling admiration. Anna Burns has been generous; this is a very generous novel with a lot to say.

What did I remember from first time around?

That we are told straight away the milkman is dead, and not knowing that is somehow not a relief.

“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. He had been shot by one of the state hit squads and I did not care about the shooting of this man. Others did care though, and some were those who, in the parlance, ‘knew me to see but not to speak to’ and I was being talked about because there was a rumour started by them, or more likely by first brother-in-law, that I had been having an affair with this milkman and that I was eighteen and he was forty-one.”

What else did I remember?

That it was a short novel. Wrong.

Her voice. That she was a compelling narrator. Absolutely. Though a bit irritating, mostly amazing.

I needed to read it again…slowly. What did I find?

That it was harder to read a second time. Right.

That there were an enormous number of relatives.

Another first memory which stuck was dread: the heady immersion in that terrifying world that resembles Northern Ireland, Belfast, in the Seventies, in the middle of the Troubles.

“Although it is recognisable as this skewed form of Belfast, it’s not really Belfast in the 70s. I would like to think it could be seen as any sort of totalitarian, closed society existing in similarly oppressive conditions,” Burns explains. “I see it as a fiction about an entire society living under extreme pressure, with long-term violence seen as the norm.”

I was re-reading when the world was killing itself. The newspapers were delivering accounts of regimes where truth has been turned on its head, where gangs and powerful groups rule and neighbour murders neighbour.

Did I like it? I did. If ‘Like’ can be qualified. Yes, it’s a triumph but what a burden. Packing in a crazy density of events that successfully builds up to such anxiety.

Throughout is the heroism and the gift for self-preservation of middle sister. The Ardoyne is no place to grow up female…or male. The men in their tacky balaclavas are pathetic but Anna Burns still manages to show how terrifying they were. The women were a more-mixed bag but they were in many cases feminist, they might condemn middle sister’s refusal to marry, but they supported each other with meals and babysitting, with their neighbourhood pharmacies; hospitals were to be avoided so the women stepped in.

Living in the middle of fear where voicing dissent, just saying the wrong thing could be a death sentence, middle sister would not join a protest, she was trying to stay under the radar of the status quo. “I’d been thwarted into a carefully constructed nothingness by that man. Also by the community, by the very mental atmosphere, that minutiae of invasion.”

Was the stalking of middle sister by the milkman at all erotic? There was nothing or no sexual energy that I could feel, even when Ma was competing with the holy women for the real milkman. Maybe-boyfriend was sweet, if obsessed by cars, but he was deaf to middle sister’s warnings about the scary, homicidal milkman.

Milkman was a sexual predator, a sleazy stalker. Middle sister needed protecting. She realised that he was picking up on her secret desires and she was being diminished to nothingness. No one was sympathetic with her refusal to take the normal path – marriage, babies, don’t ask questions – rather than peaceably continue with what she was up to with maybe-boyfriend, their maybe-relationship. She refused to answer questions. If only she’d taken advice, then that way she’d be protected.

Burns holds a mirror to the “communal policing” that takes place among “a whole community, a whole nation, conditioned too, through years of personal and communal suffering, personal and communal history, to be overladen with heaviness and grief and fear and anger.“

Sometimes re-reading was a bit like pushing through clay; another digression and we were back in time getting another story, moving forward then backwards becoming dizzy as more detail and more expansion is piled on. I was bogged down in digressions.

Yet there are so many gems, threads of stories to be followed forward and back: those genius ‘wee sisters’ so bizarrely precocious. Third brother-in-law who is so obsessed by running he cannot hear that middle sister has been poisoned, and is almost dying. (That sequence is so crazy it must be true.) Going to evening classes but missing the chance of Classics and ending up doing French. Coming home one evening after class, finding a cat’s head in the ten-minute area. Wrapping it carefully in cotton handkerchiefs then the sudden appearance of the ghastly milkman. Rescued by the real milkman whose protection is ‘he loves no one’. He is so normal. Ma’s warning, her reminder that no one asks questions, as she accepts the real milkman’s gift of double cream. Middle sister’s father’s death-bed account of being abused as a child. Wee sisters listening.

“…this is a book about rumours, gossip, the power of gossip, the power of history and also the power of fabricated history, when rumours become the history.”

It’s a novel that shows how living in fear can destroy but some heroic individuals cannot be defeated.

Is there something more that the reader can get second, or third, fourth time round?

Of course, there is. Anna Burns has been generous with her own experience, and her own fears; this is a very generous novel with a lot to say and reading it now with the world killing each other it’s not just about Northern Ireland.

“Burns’s agenda is not to unpack the dreary tribal squabbles that so characterised Troubles-era Northern Ireland; rather she is working in an altogether more interesting milieu, seeking answers to the big questions about identity, love, enlightenment and the meaning of life for a young woman on the verge of adulthood …” The Irish Times

Anna Burns says “I see it as a fiction about an entire society living under extreme pressure, with long term violence seen as the norm.”

And those societies are all around us. As she says in Milkman:

“As for the killings, they were the usual meaning they were not to be belaboured, not because they were nothing but because they were enormous, also so numerous that rapidly there became no time for them.”

Which is all hideously familiar.

And the group were unanimous. They loved the book.

Jane Kirwan  February 2024