Anna Burns’ Milkman

Abstract

Anna Burns’ Milkman Daragh Downes There are, to misquote Oscar Wilde, two ways of dislikingAnna Burns’novel Milkman (2018). The first is to dislike it, the second is to praise it loudly for its bold experimentalism. Point one may be briskly disposed of with the banality that there is no accounting for taste. Point two requires a little more elucidation. That Milkman throws stylistic and narrative convention to the winds is beyond question. A novel that begins with the words, ‘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’, can hardly be said to scream ‘business as usual’. The word ‘experimental’, however, is pure kryptonite in the book trade, being a byword for ‘difficult’, ‘inaccessible’, ‘grist to the academic mill’. To dub Milkman’s antic style experimental, as so many did upon its publication and – especially – after its Man Booker Prize nomination and subsequent win, is thus about the most unhelpful way conceivable of welcoming it into the world. Whether used with good intent or ill, the word puts many potential readers off, depriving them of a remarkably refreshing and addictive reading experience. To apply this word to Milkman is to belie the wonderful democratic spirit behind Burns’ stylistic game. It is also to miss the fact that, in terms of her own literary development, Milkman does not in truth represent much by way of an experiment. Already in her superb first novel, No Bones (2001), we find the seeds of the signature Milkman style, especially in those parts where she ventures beyond the confines of traditional narrative realism (which latter mode, and it is useful to mention this when in conversation with a Burns sceptic, she masters with consummate facility). In her follow-up, Little Constructions (2007), a novel set in a small town and treating of a deranged crime family, we see her commit fully to what we now recognise as the Milkman style: that inimitable mixed economy of outré-absurdist storytelling; garrulous essayism lubricated by psychobabble, sociologese and bureaucratese; arch observational wit; sovereignly controlled irony; obsessive-compulsive repetition; and many a sentence that sounds like it has been written in a foreign language and run Studies • volume 110 • number 438 231 through a beta version of Google Translate. There is even a character called Mr McSomebody (proprietor of a local pharmacy known as ‘Almost Chemist of theYear’). To encounter this style for the first time in Little Constructions is exciting, but it still feels there like a style in search of the right story. One gets the same impression from Mostly Hero (2014), a novella published before Burns had finished work on Milkman and whose opening sentence – ‘The villains from downtown eastside put a magic spell on femme fatale so that she would kill superhero whilst under the influence of this magic spell’– tells us all we need to know about its commitment to soberly realist nomenclature and storytelling. No Bones and Milkman may be Burns’ two great works to date, but Little Constructions and Mostly Hero tell the fascinating story of how her pen was fully freed up in the way that was to make her famous. Milkman is in part a delightfully unfashionable love letter to fiction itself, and to the counter-cultural power of fiction to offer relief to the lonely psyche wounded from having to live in a ‘hair-trigger society’ in which politics has totalistically and micrologically invaded every action, gesture, word and even thought. (It should be prescribed reading for anyone who spends too much time on Twitter). The novel’s first-person narrator – named only as ‘middle sister’ – finds that she has become an unsettling figure in the community by mere dint of her idiosyncratic habit of reading-while-walking. This habit, as her paramilitary-connected best friend from schooldays coolly informs her over a quiet drink, has led the community to ‘pronounce[] its diagnosis’ on her as a freak whose public immersion in pre-twentieth-century novels is ‘disturbing… deviant… optical illusional’ and ‘[n]ot public-spirited’. No one, the friend points out, ‘should go around in a political scene with...