BOOK REVIEW: ‘Milkman’ by Anna Burns

OPINION:

MILKMAN

By Anna Burns

Graywolf Press, $16, 352 pages

This is a bad news-bad news review. First the first bad news: I didn’t like it. And the second bad news? The author may never write again.

“Milkman,” Anna Burns’ third book, sold more than 350,000 copies in England. “Milkman” won this year’s Man Booker Prize, England’s highest award for fiction. That’s a big deal, on par with our National Book Award, which means it’s to be taken seriously.

But taking this book seriously is what I had difficulty doing. Why? Because of the density of its prose, the oddness of its structure and the purposeful obfuscation of its narrative. Also, the author likes to tell you, ahead of time, what’s going to happen to the characters. These conditions make “Milkman” hard to read.

But that’s not a literary death sentence. Many great novels written in the English — think Joyce’s “Ulysses” or most of William Faulkner’s books or any of the more recent dystopian novels like Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” — are hard to read. But they’re worth the effort because they reward the diligent reader with beautiful prose, surprising humor and insights into character.

At times, “Milkman” meets these standards, but for me not often enough. And its paragraphs run on and on for pages, often with no punctuation or clear indication of which character is speaking, which caused it to be tagged an experimental novel (a label with which the author disagrees).

The novel is narrated by an 18-year-old unmarried female called Middle Sister — she has six sisters, three older and three younger; the three youngest are referred to, collectively, as “wee sisters,” which I found kind of charming. They live in a country that also is never named. The boy she’s been dating (and sleeping with) for a year is never named, and is referred to throughout the novel as “maybe-boyfriend,” which quickly got on my nerves.

It doesn’t take long to see that the unnamed country is generally Ireland and the unnamed city specifically Belfast (where Anna Burns was born and raised) and that the action takes place in the 1970s, much like The Troubles. People are constantly spying on one another and reporting them to authorities of the state, and almost every family has permanently lost a family member to a “political death,” such as stepping on a land mine or simply being shot by minions or sympathizers of the state.

The narrator becomes suspect because of what her community considers odd behavior — “reading-while-walking,” running and taking a night course in French. In that sense the book is a brilliant explication of the dangers of standing out, being a creative type in an anti-creative community, i.e. simply being different.

The tension and the title come from the fact that the narrator is being stalked by one of the chief “renouncers” of the state, a militaristic 41-year-old, possibly married, called only Milkman. She is not interested in him or what he represents, but her community assumes she is having an affair with him, for which she is damned by some and praised by others.

Further complicating this already very complicated story is the presence of another milkman — a real one, who is called, of course, “real milkman.” He’s as nice and beloved as the other is respected (out of fear).

That’s all I can tell you without giving away too much of the story, because there is a story here.

So, on to the second bad news, which is that Anna Burns may never write again. As she recently told an interviewer, she has “lower back and nerve pain” from an unsuccessful operation, and has not written in the four-and-a-half years, since she finished this book. The Man Booker Prize’s $64,000 stipend will pay for another operation, and if that one works she will be able to write “normally” again — as opposed to standing up, which is how she wrote “Milkman.”

But winning the Man Booker and colleting its prize money has already returned dividends. She told an interviewer that she has paid her debts. And in the book she thanks her neighborhood food bank, a charity that helped her pay her rent, and England’s “Housing and Council Tax Benefit System.”

One hopes that this clearly brilliant writer is able to get back to doing what she does so well, which is to pull back the curtain and show us the human heart in all its weird and wonderful complexities.

But next time, as far as this reviewer is concerned, use some names, please, and make your story easier to follow. One should not have to translate a book written in a language one speaks.

• John Greenya, a Washington writer and critic, is the author of “Gorsuch: The Judge Who Speaks For Himself” (Simon and Schuster, 2018).