Book of the Month: Milkman (2018) by Anna Burns

Critical Evaluation

In an unnamed town and in an unnamed country, our narrator, the Middle Sister, is doing the best she can to contend — to contend with other people’s desires and wants for her life. Young women don’t culturally belong only to themselves, even if they want, but are subject still to the desires of their parents, families, boyfriends, older siblings, friends, churches and communities.

They want her to stop walking around town with her nose in a book, to which she asks, “Are you saying it’s okay for him to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read ‘Jane Eyre’ in public?” Her habit has drawn the attention of a man referred to as Milkman, a senior member of the paramilitary whom everyone warns her about. But, she explains, he is not her boyfriend or lover. He is her stalker, her nemesis and her nightmare. Milkman won’t leave her alone, even threatening to kill the man she cares for — who is named only as her “maybe boyfriend.”

She is trying to lay low, steer clear of the sectarian strife around her, but her withdrawn nature is startling to just about everyone around her. Everyone else is deeply involved in side-taking, judgment and policing each other’s behavior as friends, neighbors and enemies are killed, vanished or punished for being on the right or wrong side of things.

No one believes she isn’t involved with the Milkman. Even her best friend, whom she finally entrusts with her secret that the Milkman is upending and threatening her life, only berates her for walking while reading too much, bringing all of this scrutiny on herself, being different from everyone else.

“Milkman” is a deft and triumphant work of considerable intelligence and importance.

A.N. Devers, “Anna Burns’ Booker-winning ‘Milkman’ isn’t a difficult read; It’s a Triumph.” LA Review of Books. January 4, 2019.

First Excerpt

I was alone and not reading this time, for I never read while running. And there he was, again out of nowhere, this time falling into step beside me where he’d never been before. Instantly we were running together and it looked as if always we were running together and again I was startled, as I would be startled by every encounter, except the last, I was to have with this man. At first he didn’t speak, and I could not speak. Then he did and his talk was mid-conversation as if too, always we were mid-conversation. His words were brief and a little strained because of my pace of running, and it was of my place of work that he spoke. He knew my work – where it was, what I did there, the hours, the days and the twenty-past-eight bus I caught every morning when it wasn’t being hijacked to get me into town to it. Also he made the pronouncement that I never caught this bus home. This was true. Every weekday, rain or shine, gunplay or bombs, stand-off or riots, I preferred to walk home reading my latest book. This would be a nineteenth-century book because I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century. I suppose now, looking back, the milkman knew all of that as well. (5)

Second Excerpt

My attention was first brought to the issue of the shiny people, those rare, baffling, radiant type of people, by that film, Rear Window. I saw it when I was twelve and it unnerved me because of what I believed initially to be its point. A little dog gets killed, strangled, neck broken, which is not the message of the film but for me was the message of the film because its owner – bereft, in shock – wails out her window over all the apartment building, ‘Which one of you did it?…couldn’t imagine…so low you’d kill a little helpless friendly…only thing in this whole neighborhood who liked anybody. Did you kill him because he liked you, just because he liked you?’ and it was that ‘killing him because he liked you’ that caused shivers to go down my spine. I knew immediately, oh God! It’s true! That is why they killed it! They killed it because it liked them! Turned out that wasn’t the reason why the dog was killed but before I discovered the real reason, absolutely it made sense to me, in the world I was in, that it had happened that way. They killed it because it liked them, because they couldn’t cope with being liked, couldn’t cope with innocence, frankness, openness, with a defenselessness and an affection and purity so pure, so affectionate, that the dog and its qualities had to be done away with. Couldn’t bear it. Had to kill it. Probably they themselves would have viewed this as self-defense. And that was the trouble with the shiny people. Take a whole group of individuals who weren’t shiny, maybe a whole community, a whole nation, or maybe just a statelet immersed long-term on the physical and energetic planes in the dark mental energies; conditioned too, through years of personal and communal sufferings, personal and communal history, to be overladen with heaviness and grief and fear and anger – well these people could not, not at the drop of a hat, be open to any bright shining button of a person stepping into their environment and shining upon them like that. (88-9)