middle sister, the narrator of Anna Burns’s novel Milkman (2018) likes to walk around reading books, and always,
this would be a nineteenth-century book because I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century.
She even has a nightmare about Proust (who has an acceptable toe dipped into her century) later in the book
in which he turned out to be some reprehensible contemporary Nineteen-Seventies writer, which apparently was why he was being sued in court in the dream, by, I think me.
The book is set in the 1970s, and there’s a good reason middle sister don’t like her own century: it’s been very cruel to her and the people around her. Milkman takes place in an unnamed city which is probably Belfast in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, —which I didn’t know much about coming in, but Burns paints a portrait of terror and death, and of death and terror subsumed by mundanity.
This book is completely saturated by death and destruction. But what made me finish it in three days was middle sister’s incredible hilarious perspicacious narration. When the pernicious Somebody McSomebody is hitting on her at the bar with his creepy compliments,
inappropriate, squirmy, calculated, rapacious, particularly as not long afterwards, – or not long before, as in my case – you know it’s going to be insults, threats of violence, threats of death and variations on stalk-talk.
For a moment she has sympathy for him because his father, oldest brother, and sister had been killed in political violence, then his other brother had been killed while crossing the road, and then his youngest brother had killed himself because of nuclear-terror. But then she thinks, “Not my fault though.”
middle sister draws a lot of ire from her community. Like her mother says,
You make it hard, wee girl, to love you and if your poor father was alive he’d have something to say about this.
“I doubt it,” middle sister thinks, because her father hardly ever spoke and when he was on his death bed he says to her,
‘I was raped many times as a boy, did I ever tell you that?’ At the time all I could think to reply was, ‘No’ ‘Many times. Many, many times…’ and wee sisters who were with me at the hospital, came round the bed and tugged on my arm. ‘What’s raped?’ they whispered. ‘What’s crumbie?’ because now with eyes still closed, da was muttering crombie.
The grim facts of life are so pervasive that they land as punchlines.
Milkman is a very unconventional bildungsroman. One day middle sister is out walking around reading Ivanhoe and a guy called Milkman comes by and offers her a ride in his creepy white van.
I didn’t know whose milkman he was. He wasn’t our milkman. I don’t think he was anybody’s. He didn’t take milk orders. There was no milk about him. He didn’t ever deliver milk.
We actually find out after he gets shot and killed by the State (this is no secret, the first sentence of the book ends with “the same day the milkman died”) that his real name is Milkman; of which middle sister opines, “why was that weird? Butcher’s a name… So is Weaver, Hunter, Roper, Cleaver, Player, Mason, Thatcher, Carver, Wheeler, Planter, Trapper, Teller, Doolittle, Pope, and Nunn”.
But Milkman is a “renouncer” which means a revolutionary fighting against the State. And he’s a big time one at that.
middle sister is in no way interested in his advances. She’s repulsed and horrified, but she becomes grist for the rumor mill and soon everybody is talking about her affair with Milkman. But she’s inscrutable, the last thing she wants is to have to defend herself against allegations which are obviously not true, and so she recedes deeper into herself, separating herself even further from the understanding of the community.
She gets a rude awakening one day when she’s talking to her friend at the bar that she’s become somebody the town considers “beyond the pale” and not because of the Milkman, mostly because of her walking-while-reading,
It’s the way you do it – reading books, whole books, taking notes, checking footnotes, underlining passages as if you’re at a desk or something… It’s disturbing. It’s deviant. It’s optical illusional. Not public-spirited. Not self-preservation. Calls attention to itself and why – with enemies at the door, with the community under siege, with us all having to pull together – would anyone want to call attention to themselves here?
The real problem, as somebody says later on, is that “no one should go around in a political scene with their head switched off.”
There’s a reason everybody in this book is referred to by their relationality rather than their proper names. It’s not just middle sister; everybody is participating in this distancing from reality because reality is so hard to bear. middle sister has a boyfriend called maybe-boyfriend. But neither of them it seems are interested in taking a step further away from the maybe territory. Because nobody in this world ends up with someone that they actually love.
middle sister’s older sister was in love with a dude who got blown up by a car bomb, so she married some other dolt and no she’s always unhappy and just spends her days drinking and cursing. Her brother dumped a girl he was truly in love with to run off and marry someone else because
Being loved back by the person he loved to the point where he couldn’t cope anymore with the vulnerable reciprocity of giving and receiving, he ended the relationship to get it over with before he lost it, before it was snatched from him, either by fate or by somebody else.
But this whole novel is the story of her coming to recognize that a certain type of attention is necessary. Like her friend tells her in the bar,
your not wanting to be present but now forced by circumstance of Milkman to be present has been one of those reality checks that life has given you – to round you out, to step you up, to set you on the next stage of your journey.
And later on in the book she inadvertently witnesses her maybe-boyfriend in a tender moment with someone that he actually loves and she thinks,
What an idjit me, I thought, and I meant in thinking I’d protected myself, believing myself safe from wrong spouse category by staying in the maybe-category when it turns out a person can be done to death in the maybe category as well. The truth was dawning on me of how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, be present, be adult.
The style of Milkman though, is its special distinction. Anna Burns creates a language that serves the content of the book perfectly—which should be the goal of every novel. Like Beckett reminds us in his essay DANTE… BRUNO. VICO… JOYCE, Dante taught us that,
he who would write in the vulgar must assemble the purest elements from each dialect and construct a synthetic language that would at least possess more than a circumscribed local interest.
The novel is artificial. We have to find a language that suits it perfectly. Nobody speaks the kind of English in this book except for middle sister, and she speaks it exquisitely.
At the end of novel, thankfully fortunately beautifully, with Milkman dead, she finds, I think, something resembling peace,
I inhaled the early evening light and realised this was softening, what others might term a little softening. Then, landing on the pavement in the direction of the parks & reservoirs, I exhaled this light and for a moment, just a moment, I almost nearly laughed.
