An urgent and highly original piece of fiction. The reader is gripped from the first sentence: “The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day milkman died.” And both the prose form and idea generation are highly original. It would be for these reasons that the novel won the Booker Prize. However, Milkman is not always an easy read. Perhaps its intensity “forces” the reader to engage throughout. There is no let-up or downtime, and the prose reads as one lengthy stream of consciousness block. Perseverance does pay off in the end, though, as Milkman captures better than anything else I have read probably what Belfast, although the city is never formally named, must have felt like during The Troubles. As Burns details, the modus operandi would have been not to stand out. However, the novel's narrator does, and the consequences that play out from this form the dynamic of the novel. Adherence to convention is shown as both a benefit and a limitation. How gossip unspools is also dealt with superbly. Burns has a sharp eye for dialogue, her insights are superb, and her satire—at the absurdity of how things work—is evident. Overlaid on this is the perspective of a female narrator and the gendered assumptions that dominated the era. Even if not for the casual reader, there is a lot for critical theorists to get their teeth into. 8/10.
By Anna Burns