In the meantime, the political and social atmosphere becomes so clotted and choked and paranoid that it resembles Elsinore, with spies and traitors everywhere. In this state of mute innuendo and fear, middle sister can't explain to anyone what is happening with the milkman. Specific names were forbidden: anything too over-the-water-ish (like Nigel) induced a 'taunting, long-memory, back-dated, we-shall-not-forget, historical-distaste reaction.'Īt its core, 'Milkman' is a wildly good and true novel of how living in fear limits people. The enemies are not called Loyalists or British but those 'over the road' or 'over the water.' Language itself betrays allegiance certain words - quintessential, extraordinary - are obviously and unacceptably 'over the water' words.

Middle sister doesn't use words like Ireland, Britain, Protestant, Catholic, IRA, Republicans, Unionists, or Belfast. It isn't just people: the unnameability of things is central to this novel, and to the hot, choked paranoia and tribalism of its context. Then there is her 'maybe-boyfriend,' a mechanic who, the milkman implies, might find himself on the wrong side of a car bomb soon.

Instead, there is middle sister, eldest sister, longest friend, wee sisters, Somebody McSomebody and first brother-in-law. People in the neighborhood believe she is having an affair with the milkman, and fear her too.īook News & Features Challenging, Shattering 'Girl' Is No Half-Formed ThingĪs you will have noticed by now, the characters of Milkman don't have names. She is 'being followed, being spied upon, photographed, misperceived, encircled, anticipated.' Gradually the fear invades every aspect of her life. 'I did not know intuition and repugnance counted, did not know I had a right not to like, not to have to put up with, anybody and everybody coming near.' '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 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?' she says.

She says no, but he begins trailing her, insinuating himself, making oblique threats. There were the general Troubles, of course, but middle sister's specific troubles begin when a powerful paramilitary figure called the milkman (he's not a milkman) starts offering her rides home. 'These were knife-edge times, primal times, with everybody suspicious of everybody,' says middle sister, the narrator of Anna Burns's brutally intelligent novel Milkman, set amid the Troubles in 1970's Northern Ireland. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Milkman Author Anna Burns

Milkman by anna burns