It seems impossible to have an identity of one’s own. Almost all the characters are referred to not by their names but by their relation to other people in the community. The sense of interconnectedness is hugely important to the claustrophobia of middle sister’s story. It has the feel of heft the moment one opens its pages and discovers dense blocks of text with sentences that run on and on, like the book’s characters, difficult to separate from one another. With this scope, it is unsurprising Milkman won the Booker Prize for 2018. It is a universal depiction of tribalism, of a society seeming to knit itself together in opposition to an external force but in so doing, managing to cause fractures through itself. However, by shying away from specifics, Burns has made this a story that transposes itself to any of the many besieged communities around the world. Gossip foreshadows violence in the close-knit society and so it is that middle sister must disprove an unprovable while neither becoming too ‘interesting’ or being considered ‘beyond the pale’ and ostracised from her community.Īlthough it is never explicitly stated, Milkman (2018) appears to be set in 1970’s Belfast (where Anna Burns grew up) and with talk of those ‘over the water’ and people of ‘the other religion’, it is impossible to situate it anywhere else more clearly in one’s mind. Middle sister may not give Milkman any encouragement, but rumours start that this young girl has taken up with a married man, more than twenty years her senior. An older man, rumoured to be a renouncer, and Milkman by name but not, seemingly, by profession. She is navigating her sectarian-divided community numbed to violence as well as many, until, that is, Milkman appears on the scene. Aside from flagrant reading of Dostoevsky and Dickens, middle sister is a normal teenager: she sees her partly-secret maybe-boyfriend several times a week, bats off questions of marriage from her mother who knows nothing of her love life, and helps take care of little sisters with her father dead and gone. At eighteen years old, she is not enacting a small rebellion, she is simply doing as pleases her.

And yet, that is what middle sister does. Walking the streets with your head always in a nineteenth century book is viewed as reckless then. In a city of proclamations and whispers, being interesting is taking a risk.

Milkman anna burns review