She’s Trapped But Her Voice Is Free

Milkman a novel by Anna Burns.  Graywolf Press.  348 pp.  $16.00 ****1/2

Milkman is simultaneously one of the most terrifying and hilarious novels in recent memory.  It’s terrifying because it portrays a society where the two sides are locked in such mortal combat that people have become dreadfully paranoid; to express a shred of compassion for the other side is to be ostracized and perhaps in physical danger.  It’s hilarious because the woman narrating the story has such a freewheeling style, with sentences going on and on (but somehow never unclear) so that we’re reading terrible things and laughing at the same time.  The effect is unsettling.  It’s like, That’s terrible!  Don’t stop!

Although Anna Burns hails from Belfast, Northern Ireland, and we naturally assume she’s writing about her native country (she now lives in England), she never names the place she’s writing about, nor does she name her characters.  She refers to siblings, for instance, as first brother, second brother, third brother.  The two sides in the dispute have various names, like the people of the right religion, the people of the wrong religion or renouncers and people from over the water.  She refers to the man she’s sleeping with as maybe-boyfriend.  And she refers to the man who’s stalking her as the milkman, though he’s not actually a milkman.

The effect of all this not-naming is that the story is oddly removed from place and time.  We know what she must be writing about, but since she doesn’t name it, it could be anywhere. The Middle East.   India.  She could be writing about this country.  I don’t think we’ve quite reached this level of animosity and paranoia, but we’re getting there.  She’s actually writing about the whole world, without giving any of the specifics.  There are two sides, and they’re both fiercely devoted to their side, and they’re not speaking to anyone on the other side; they hate the other side.  Where is that not true (and how have we come to this)?

Here’s the level of paranoia.  Maybe-boyfriend is a car mechanic, to the point where there are car parts all over his house, and he’s gotten a chance to work on a truly classic car, one that any mechanic would love to see, much less work on.  His friends come around the house to see what he’s doing.  But they know that that particular automobile (a classic, built long before the current troubles) has a small flag on it that belongs to the other side, and though maybe-boyfriend isn’t working on the part of the car with the flag, some of his friends think it’s traitorous of him to work on that car at all.  He’s not endorsing the flag or anything to do with it.  He’s just working on the car.  But some people think that by doing that he is endorsing it, and they bring that fact up in a vaguely threatening way.  People have gotten in trouble for a lot less.

Compounding that problem, the milkman, who is a prominent renouncer, has taken a fancy to our narrator and suddenly shows up in her presence, when she is taking a walk, or coming home from maybe-boyfriend’s place.  He walks with her, as if he’s been following her, which makes her wonder if he has been following her, and how often, and what it means that he’s doing that, and how much power she has to resist him (and his cronies, who also keep turning up).  She even wonders if maybe boyfriend is in danger because she sleeps with him, and Milkman might not like that.  The general feeling is that she’s trapped in this place and this situation with nowhere to turn, and no way out.

Except that the way she tells the story is as free as a bird.  This is one of those books where I could pick a quotation at random, start anywhere, and give you the general feeling.  The following passage is from early in the novel, when our narrator is going for a run (she goes for long runs) with her brother in law.

“And here I was the following day, with third brother-in-law, running in the parks & reservoirs.  He was doing his mutterings and I was trying to dwell, not on the milkman as ma thought—as all of them thought—but on maybe-boyfriend, whom I was going to be seeing for a sunset that night.  As for the milkman, there appeared no sign, which didn’t mean ‘Hurray!  Got rid of!  Wonderful!’ because, of course, he could be hovering.  With hidden state security, hidden military intelligence, plainclothes people pretending not to be plainclothes people, plus all that general ‘glimpsed one second, gone the next then back again’ local demi-monde activity, the parks & reservoirs was definitely a hovering kind of place.  But no.  There appeared no sign and this was encouraging, meaning I could relax, could carry on in peace and quiet with my compulsive exercise addiction, aided and abetted by brother-in-law who beside me, was carrying on with his.”

The paragraph isn’t over.  I just got tired of typing.

There were times in this novel when I thought it was going on too long.  I was listening to this gabby and entertaining woman who was going on and on about all her paranoid fears, and I sympathized, but felt we weren’t getting anywhere.  There was a terrific sense of dread the whole time.  But toward the end of the novel, some things did happen, with her mother and one of her friends, with maybe-boyfriend, with the milkman himself, and it wasn’t that anything substantial changed, but a subtle change took place in people’s minds, including the mind of our narrator.

The truth is that, all over the world, where terrible things are happening, and awful conflicts are playing themselves out, people lead their daily lives, fall in love and out of love; girls are staying with their wee sisters (who are wildly funny and optimistic) because their ma is visiting someone in the hospital.  Life goes on in even the worst of circumstances.  There’s something beautiful and heartening about that.  Also something terribly sad.  Why can’t people just live?  Why won’t the world let them do that?

Milkman won the Man Booker Prize for 2018, and seems deserving to me.  I find myself wondering if Anna Burns has always written with this freewheeling voice.  It’s one of the wonders of the literary world.