Hi guys, it's Claire, welcome back. Today
I'm here to talk about the best book
I've read so far in 2019, and that is
'Milkman' by Anna Burns. And it's taken me
a little while to put together a review
for this one just because it is such a
rich and singular kind of book—I really
don't think I've ever read anything
quite like it, and so I'm feeling
slightly intimidated by the task ahead,
but I'm gonna try and do this book
justice just because it is so phenomenal.
So let's get right into it. In case you
don't already know, 'Milkman' follows an
unnamed, 18-year-old narrator who
is living in Belfast in the 1970s at the
height of The Troubles when she starts
being followed by a middle-aged man who
was known in her area as Milkman, and who
was rumored to be a high-profile
renouncer of the state. And up until
the moment when 'Milkman' pulls over in
his ominous white van and interrupts our
narrator during one of her long, solitary
runs through the parks and reservoirs, we
get the sense that she has been a
somewhat aloof member of her community,
prone to going on long runs by herself
and, more damningly, reading
19th-century books while walking,
because, "I did not like 20th
century books because I did not like the
20th century." And in a city where the
streets and daily life are constantly
punctuated by gun bursts and car bombs,
our narrator attempts to keep herself at
arm's length from the political conflict,
by looking the other way, by burrowing
into her books, and by keeping to herself.
And although this book isn't strong on
plot, the Milkman's pursuit of our
narrator does serve as a kind of
catalyst for her unwelcome realization
that she cannot, in fact, remove herself
mentally or physically from her lived
environment—that opting out is not an
option, and that Milkman's slow
encroachment on her threatens to sink
her into a kind of social and political
quagmire. And through this character's
slow and unwilling awakening to that
fact,
Anna Burns not only immerses you in this
particular community at this particular
time, but she also considers the extent
to which individual subjectivity
resists and is shaped by geography and
history. And she looks at how constructed
national and political and religious
borders create very real borders between
friends and families and neighbors, and
between the public and the private self.
And she's able to accomplish all of this
in no small part through the liquid
rhythm of her prose, and the elliptical
style of her storytelling, and her
absolute mastery of naturalistic
dialogue and the cadences of the local
language. And I want to start with
Burns's approach to craft and language,
just because so much of the conversation
around this book has been about the
difficulty of the prose and its run-on
sentences and long paragraphs. And I have
to say, I often find experimental
approaches to structure or style in
literary fiction to be overly
self-conscious or affected or effortful,
but in this book,
everything about the way Anna Burns
writes feels not only incredibly natural
but crucial to the story being told. And
it allows Burns to evoke not only an
incredibly powerful sense of place, but
also the teeming psychology of this
character that we're following. The
language here really is so striking and
singular, and that's due in part to its
very colloquial and provincial texture.
Early in the book, the narrator describes
the prevailing atmosphere of Belfast
during her teenage years saying, "The
thing was, these were paranoid times,
these were knife-edge times, primal times,
with everybody suspicious of everybody.
You could have a nice wee conversation
with someone here and then go away and
think, that was a nice wee unguarded
conversation I just had there, least
until you start playing it back in your
head later on." And that's just one small
example of the way that Burns
beautifully captures the sounds and
rhythms of 1970s Belfast,
and what's remarkable is that she does
so without ever using any proper nouns.
The Troubles as a political conflict is
never actually named, nor are any cities
or countries or religions or political
groups ever directly identified. And even
the characters in this book are
known only by their social role or their
relation to the narrator: chef; the issues
women; wee sisters; third brother-in-law;
maybe boyfriend. And again, in a different
kind of book, this might feel pretentious
or affected, but here it just helps to
reinforce the insularity and limited
horizons of this community—when someone
mentions the country "over the water," it
can only be one country—and it also
illustrates the extent to which your
public persona or how you are known in
society overrides whatever your true
self is. And it reflects the prevailing
adage of "say nothing," the stifling of
free and open expression, and the
contradictory expectations to never
speak of anything directly, but to also
understand implicitly what is and is not
permitted—which is what makes the
structure of this novel, with its run-on
sentences and lack of paragraph breaks,
so interesting because I think it could
in one way be read as a reaction to or a
subconscious rebellion against that
prescriptive-ness and those hemmed in
borders of public life. This novel is a
nearly unending flow of our narrator's
thoughts and memories and observations,
and in a community of "say nothing," this
young woman's inner life is depicted as
this unruly profusion of words and
feelings that serve as a kind of
liberating contrast to her
claustrophobic surroundings. But even
within that freedom, there is a constant
drum of anxiety, and although the
narrative focuses on this character's
interior life, her thoughts and memories
are constantly interspersed with and
interrupted by her present lived reality.
It's an elliptical narrative that is
constantly circling back on itself and
creating, for the reader, the feeling of
being pulled into a kind of vortex of
tangled relationships and the violent,
grim happenings that define life in
1970s Belfast. And so you can feel the
tension between the narrator's internal
attempts to block out the noise and
car bombs, and her ultimate inability to
ignore the external world and the
plummeting dread she feels whenever
she's running alone and here's that soft
click of a surveillance camera. And so
throughout the book, you get this sense
of things about to boil over, of things
being strung tight and stretched thin,
and of the precarity of individual
sanity under such strained circumstances.
And so, in that way, Burns's use of
language, and the specific structure and
rhythms of her storytelling, are not
experimental for their own sake, but
rather create a sense of atmosphere and
tension between the narrator and her
surroundings. And they also lay the
groundwork for Burns to explore the many
key themes of this novel, first among
them being that question of "What happens
to the individual amidst such constant
violence and surveillance and paranoia?"
Our narrator's community is a powder keg
of informers and renouncers, and
suspicions and accusations, and it's an
environment where every citizen has to
negotiate a public and a private self—
which is something our narrator
stubbornly resists, offering as little of
herself up for public speculation as
possible, saying, "I refused to be evoked,
drawn out, shocked into revelation.
Instead I minimalized, withheld, subverted
thinking, dropped all interactions
surplus to requirement, which meant they
got no public content, no symbolic
content, no full-bodiedness, no
bloodlessness, no passion of the moment,
no turn of the plot, no sad shade, no
angry shade. no panicked shade, no
location of anything, just me downplayed,
just me devoid, just me uncomingled." But
the narrator's very unwillingness to
play by the rules, her insistence on
doing things like reading while walking,
and now her supposed association with
Milkman, attract attention and make her a
subject of gossip and rumor anyway—offering nothing, it turns out, is not
enough, and the narrator learns the hard
way that she has far less control over
her public self than she thought. And there's
this staggering scene in the book where
the narrator enters a chip shop and
suddenly realizes, with the full force of
it, how her community sees her and how an
entire narrative has been forming around
her without her consent. And just as
Milkman subtly encroaches on her
physical space and peace of mind, so too
does her community, with its whispers and
its condemnations and its willful
misperception, rob her of her autonomy
and force her into a role and a story
that she wants no part of. And so you
have these layers of violation going on,
and you start to understand how
difficult it is to maintain a hold on
one's sanity, how resistance starts to
capitulate under those kinds of
pressures. And as this kind of cruel and
violating scrutiny works to alienate
people from their selves and their
community, so too does the constant
threat of physical violence warp one's
sense of what's normal and acceptable.
There's an incredibly striking moment in
the book, when the narrator recalls an
event from her childhood when the state
police marched into her area and slit
the throats of all the neighborhood dogs,
and she's describing this horrifying
scene, and the "slimy, pelty" mess of this
pile of killed dogs, and then she
proceeds to say that she had completely
forgotten about it up until this moment—
which is insane, but also a testament to
the kind of mental suppression and the
blocking out of trauma that is necessary
to survive and carry on in this kind of
environment. To allow yourself to feel
those normal human emotions makes you
vulnerable, and to acknowledge the
stupidity and waste of it all makes you
a traitor, and to trust someone or show
someone your true self feels incredibly
dangerous and almost transgressive, when
this threat of violence and retribution
hangs over everything all the time. And
it reaches such a pitch of absurdity
that it becomes impossible to see
straight, impossible to parse what's
normal from what's not normal, to the
point that simple acts of
empathy start to seem twisted and
unnatural. There's a moment when the
narrator is walking home late at night
and discovers the head of a dead cat in
the middle of the street—again, maybe not
the best book for animal lovers—but she
feels this sudden, inexplicable urge to
bury the cat's head, and it's an impulse
that springs from basic human compassion,
but in this city, at this particular time,
to be seen gingerly wrapping up a cat's
head in a handkerchief would seem
suspicious and grotesque, and it's a
small, weird moment, but it's also just
heartbreaking and shows the extent to
which, in this surveillance society,
people are incredibly isolated from each
other and from their emotions, and that
natural human instinct for love and
tenderness and compassion is just
utterly suppressed. And what I think
Burns ultimately does most beautifully
is illustrate the extent to which living
in such a rigid and prescriptive society
absolutely destroys people's ability to
determine their own destinies and
imagine a world with broader horizons.
And this is exemplified in an absolutely
stunning scene about a third of the way
into the book, when the narrator is at an
evening French class downtown, and her
instructor asks the students to
describe all the colors of the sunset
outside the window, and the narrator
thinks, "Even then, even though there were
more colors than the acceptable three in
the sky, that evening still I kept my
mouth shut, and now others in this class,
all older than me,
some as old as thirty, also weren't
admitting it, it was the convention not to admit it,
not to accept detail, for this type of
detail would mean choice, and choice
would mean responsibility, and what if we
failed in our responsibilities, failed
too in the interrogation of the
consequence of seeing more than we could
cope with. Worse, what if it was nice,
whatever it was, and we liked it, got used
to it, were cheered up by it, came to rely
upon it only for it to go away or be
wrenched away, never to come back again.
Better not to have had it in the first
place was the prevailing feeling, and
that was why blue was the color for our
sky to be." It's just this gorgeous and
absolutely devastating scene that gets
at the heart of what really is at stake
in all of this. What's at stake for the
narrator and the people in her French
class, and her entire community, is the
ability to see and acknowledge beauty
and truth and nuance, and different
shades of possibilities, to see and
experience all of that color and to feel
empowered and exhilarated by it, rather
than fearful of it. It's just an
incredible scene, and that was the moment
in this book when I went from liking it
to feeling like, "Wow, this is the real
deal." And I realize that a lot of this
discussion makes this book sound like a
real drag, but it's not, it has this kind
of rapturous and almost magical quality
that just makes it an absolute pleasure
to read. And on top of that, it's also
incredibly funny in certain moments—it's
a black, absurd kind of comedy that
highlights the ridiculousness of the
times without undercutting the very real
stakes of the violence that's happening
around them. And without spoiling
anything, in its last moments, there is
also a buoyant kind of hopefulness to
this book that you might not expect. And
I initially questioned that hopefulness,
because it seems like almost too tidy a
bow for what is otherwise such an unruly
and unconventional book. but really, what
might seem too whimsical or too fairy
tale an ending for this kind of story
is really just the ordinary trying to
assert itself against all odds. And this
book closes with a familiar scene that
might be a radical victory, or it might
be mere normality, or it could just be
the same story circling back on itself
once again, repeating the same old
pattern. But that possibility that it
might be a new beginning is enough to
leave you with the sense of the maybe
hopeful. Those are all my thoughts on
'Milkman' by Anna Burns—if you've read
this book, I would love to discuss it
more down in the comments below, and if
you haven't, I cannot recommend it enough. It
might not be for everyone, but it is just
a remarkable, remarkable book. Thanks so
much for watching, and I'll see you again
soon. Bye!
