This is by Anna Burns; it was published in 2018; and it won the Booker Prize that year, and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction the following year.

My advice: Choose the audio-version, read by Brid Brennan (who is absolutely superb); and if you possibly can, listen to it while your Irish holiday is segueing into your Northern Irish stopover...

The setting is Belfast (although the city is never specifically named) during the "Troubles" of the 1970s. The narrator is 18. She's "middle sister" or "middle daughter" or "maybe-girlfriend", depending on who's talking to her. Hardly anyone is named in this book. It's an era when naming is labelling, and there's enough of that already: "At this time, in this place, when it came to the political problems, which included bombs and guns and death and maiming, ordinary people said 'their side did it' or 'our side did it', or 'their religion did it' or 'our religion did it' or 'they did it' or 'we did it', when what was really meant was 'defenders-of-the-state did it' or 'renouncers-of-the-state did it' or 'the state did it'... 'Us' and 'them' was second nature."

There's even a list of names, which -- if you're from the narrator's "side" -- you may not choose to give your children: "The names not allowed were not allowed for the reason they were too much of the country 'over the water', with it no matter that some of those names hadn't originated in that country but instead had been appropriated and put to use by the people of that land." (It's only boys' names that are affected, though, because girls' names weren't "politically contentious".) Everything is a marker of "tribal identification": "The right butter. The wrong butter. The tea of allegiance. The tea of betrayal... You created a political statement everywhere you went, and with everything you did, even if you didn't want to."

The narrator's community is on the renouncer side. And Milkman offers a really, really eye-opening insight into the stifling effects of sectarian conflict and the constant surveillance it brings with it. Burns was born in Belfast in the early 1960s, and grew up in a working-class Catholic community. So she knows what she's talking about (as Colin Crummy, who was also raised in that kind of environment, endorses). Not only do you have the British Army on your back (and, if our narrator is to be believed, that's a thoroughly humiliating experience for ordinary people to have to put up with), but you also have your local paramilitaries laying down rules, imposing curfews, setting up kangaroo courts, and meting out a variety of pretty brutal punishments. In such a divided world, minor things get blown way out of proportion, and it's very easy to find yourself on the wrong side of your local vigilantes.

And loss is everywhere. People are killed; and people go on the run to save themselves.



***

The conflict situation affects all areas of everyday life. No-one trusts phones, for example. And you definitely don't want to end up in hospital: "One set of authorities, pronounced the community, always brought on another set of authorities, and should it be that you were shot, or poisoned, or knifed, or damaged in any way you didn't feel like talking about, the police would be informed by the hospital regardless of your wishes and they would show up from their barracks right away... So no. According to communal rules you didn't want to bother with hospitals. Why would you anyway, with safe-house surgery theatres, back-parlour casualty wards, homemade apothecaries and with more than enough garden-shed pharmacies dotted about the place?"

As if all that weren't bad enough, the political and the sexual seem closely intermingled in their oppressive darkness. A major storyline in Milkman follows the stalking and intimidation of the narrator by the 41-year-old senior renouncer known as Milkman. This is a very, very creepy element of the book, but it's made worse by the distinctly misogynistic climate of the times (not, of course, that this was the exclusive preserve of the narrator's community): "At the time, age eighteen, having been brought up in a hair-trigger society where the ground rules were -- if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn't there? At eighteen I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment. I had a feeling for them, an intuition, a sense of repugnance for some situations and some people, but I did not know intuition and repugnance counted, did not know I had a right not to like, not to have to put up with, anybody and everybody coming near."

There are "issue women" in the area -- people who "seemed to know an awful lot about gender history and sexual politics" -- but they're subject to negative attitudes ranging from suspicion to downright intimidation. (Interestingly, figuring among the "larger-than-life pin-ups of inspirational, prototypal past and present wonderwomen" that adorn the walls of the issue women's meeting-shed was none other than the recently deceased Dolly Parton.) The "traditional women" are definitely not meek and mild, and occasionally stage big, noisy protests against arbitrary curfews and the like, but they evince little patience with these defenders of women's rights.


Belfast, 2026. Our story predates the Beacon of Hope...

***

As far as the non-existent relationship between the narrator and Milkman is concerned -- the one that's been represented as a full-on relationship by the community's enthusiastic gossipers -- the blame is squarely placed on the young woman, who is driven into complete taciturnity as her only means of defence: "I, too, came to find me inaccessible. My inner world, it seemed, had gone away." Even her mother won't believe her account of things.

Her relationship with maybe-boyfriend, for whom Milkman -- he tells the narrator -- might be planning a nice little carbomb, also starts to founder under the weight of fear and silence.

And even her one confidante, "longest friend", is unsympathetic. Not just about the Milkman thing, but about the narrator's whole way of being -- particularly, her habit of "reading-while-walking", which has been criticized on several occasions already. It's worth quoting this bit at length, because it's such a good illustration of Burns's style (and her point):

"'It's creepy, perverse, obstinately determined,' went on longest friend. 'It's not as if, friend,' she said, 'this were a case of a person glancing at some newspaper as they're walking along to get the latest headlines or something. It's the way you do it -- reading books, whole books, taking notes, checking footnotes, underlining passages as if you're at some desk or something, in a little private study or something, the curtains closed, your lamp on, a cup of tea beside you, essays being penned -- your discourses, your lucubrations. 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?' 'Hold on a minute,' I said. 'Are you saying it's okay for him to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read Jane Eyre in public?' 'I didn't say not in public. Just don't do it while you're walking about. They don't like it,' she added, meaning the community... 'Semtex isn't unusual,' she said. 'It's not NOT to be expected. It's not incapable of being mentally grasped, of being understood, even if most people here don't carry it, have never seen it, don't know what it looks like and don't want anything to do with it. It fits in -- more than your dangerous reading-while-walking fits in... 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 as far as I can see, friend, the only thing that's done that for you ever has been Milkman appearing, as now he has, on your scene.'"

Be grateful for your stalker, in other words, because he's making you normal... Jeez...



***

Then events cascade. The narrator is poisoned. The culprit ("tablets girl"), a mentally ill serial poisoner who has (again because of the prevailing distrust of the authorities) never been properly dealt with, now turns up dead. The community is convinced that Milkman killed her because she had dared to touch his alleged mistress, the narrator, who is now treated with horrified awe by everyone around her: "I was to be hated, feared, despised, but crucially to be kept in with."

Next, maybe-boyfriend is attacked. Shocked by all of that, and tired of struggling, the narrator, when Milkman appears again, climbs into his sinister white van. He doesn't "do" anything, but he commands her to be ready for a date the next day: She should wear "something lovely". It's a measure of the twistedness of the situation that neither of them has any doubt that she will comply. Who can she turn to, after all?

But before the rendezvous can happen, the state forces shoot and kill him. The narrator is massively relieved: "No more having to watch my back, expecting to turn a corner to have him fall into step with me, no more being followed, being spied upon, photographed, misperceived, encircled, anticipated. No more being commanded. No more capitulation such as the night before when I got beat down enough, had become indifferent to my fate enough as to have stepped inside his van. Most of all there would be no more worry about ex-maybe-boyfriend being killed by a carbomb." Her relief makes her realize "how much I'd been thwarted into a carefully constructed nothingness by that man".

Milkman (it turns out his name actually was Milkman...) was gunned down only after six other people had been shot: "Eventually the state responded by admitting that yes, it had precision-targeted a few accidental people in pursuance of intended people, that mistakes had been made, that that had been regrettable, but that the past should be put behind, that there was no point in dwelling."

The neighbourhood kids, meanwhile, have a new plot for their play-acting: "Renouncer Hero Milkman, shadowed, set upon, then gunned down in their usual cowardly fashion by that murder squad spawned by a terrorist state."

One of those mistakenly shot was "real milkman", who really was a milkman, once stood up to the neighbourhood renouncers (not without painful consequences), eventually becomes a kind of hero, and turns out to be the long-lost love of the narrator's mother...


The former bathhouse on Ormeau Road, a thoroughfare that often hit the news in the period of confrontation

***

We're not finished with the drama, however, as the narrator herself is then attacked... This was prefigured in the very first sentence of the book: "The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died."

Anyway, she fights back. Is assisted by other women, who are primarily incensed that this male attacker is in the ladies' toilets... Eventually he appears before a kangaroo court. He's initially accused of "one-quarter rape", but the charge morphs into the easier-to-manage "taking guns unauthorised from dumps"...

There are certainly some seriously disturbed people in Milkman. But why wouldn't there be? The whole country must have been deep in PTSD... Crummy noted in 2023: "Twenty-five years on from the Good Friday Agreement, it can sometimes feel like the conflict itself almost wasn't there. It has taken on a ghostly aspect. It haunts us still, in the local politics, so stubbornly fraught and boring. It's there in Northern Ireland's mental health crisis, far and away the worst in the UK, and in the ever-present threat of violence." (The race riots in Northern Ireland only a few months ago were tinged with old conflicts: "The waning IRA threat weakened loyalist paramilitaries' claims to be community defenders, prompting them to seek a new bogeyman to justify their existence... Instead of Catholics, it was now people of colour in the crosshairs of loyalist groups, said Michaela Rafferty, of Anaka, a women's group that helped escort besieged families to safety.")



***

Booker judge Kwame Appiah comments: "The language of Anna Burns' Milkman is simply marvellous; beginning with the distinctive and consistently realised voice of the funny, resilient, astute, plain-spoken, first-person protagonist."

Not everyone likes the language, though. James Marriott complains about "its wilfully inelegant prose style", and warns that the reader will encounter "repetition, circumlocution, and paragraphs stretching over pages". Marriott seems to have missed all the humour that derives from the piling up of the incongruity...

I enjoyed the language, and thought the voice was unique and brilliant. But then, I listened to it, which was easy, because Brennan did all the heavy lifting of interpretation... Crummy found the voice "urgent and peculiar -- and so specifically Northern Irish -- that it felt recognisable to me from its first words". Mark O'Connell's really perceptive review includes a very intelligent discussion of the style. He makes comparisons with Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, Angela Carter, and Laszla Krasznahorkai (the latter two I'm unfamiliar with), and points out that "Burns seems to convey through her style a deep ambivalence about the English language itself".


It must have been tricky to report this period...

***

Impressed though I was, I had a couple of question-marks.

The chronology gets really confusing towards the end. (This wasn't just a function of listening. Even when I dug out the text, I still found it a little hard to order the events.)

And I did wonder whether it's a just a tad too long... But I'm not even sure of that...

I'm not convinced, for example, that we needed to learn that maybe-boyfriend is maybe gay; or even to learn quite so much about tablets girl (although the existential fear and despair that's revealed in her letters to her younger sister, whom she also poisoned, are emblematic of the wider community's malaise).

The heated competition among the women of the neighbourhood for the affections of real milkman, and ma's concern that she's too old for this kind of romantic rivalry, might, I suppose, be accused of extraneousness, but then again they produce some of the funniest dialogue in the book:

"Apart from her complaint then, as to her agedness, ma's other complaint was about the ubiquity of these ex-pious women... 'They're forever round there,' she cried, 'at his house with their sly moves, bringing him turnips. I saw them with their gifts of carrots and parsnips, their homemade soups, their cakes and aromatic waters of rose and their charmingly packaged, gift-wrapped potatoes sticking out of their pockets. Such deceit! It's hardly imaginable.' 'I know, ma,' I said. 'It's hardly not.' 'Dressing up too, daughter,' she went on, 'though goodness knows they're no spring--' This of course was when she remembered... that she too was no spring--."

"Charmingly packaged, gift-wrapped potatoes" just cracked me up... Marriott seems to have missed all the humour that derives from the piling up of incongruity...

The little sisters, blisteringly intelligent and devoted to junk food, are also really funny. In fact, many of the little cameos are funny -- fanatical runner third brother-in-law; third sister (always accompanied by a gang of mates "all of them with drink taken"); the ballroom-dancing "international couple" (actually ex-maybe-boyfriend's neglectful parents, who become the little girls' dance heroes)...


I'm not sure who would have taken drink here. In fact, the whole photographic enterprise in this post is a minefield...

For Appiah, this "story of brutality, sexual encroachment and resistance [is] threaded with mordant humour". And for the author of The Bee Sting, Paul Murray, Milkman is "gripping, tense, also very funny, as if Beckett had written a political thriller". It's extraordinarily clever to inject genuine laughs into such a dark, dark story.

And there are, of course, glimmers of hope, which might well have been extinguished with a tighter, leaner approach. Claire Kilroy points out: "The will of the community initially appears hegemonic and invincible, but the narrator's fellow 'beyond-the-pales', although disparate, are beacons of hope... What starts out as a study of how things go wrong becomes a study in how things go right, and the green shoots are not the work of the paramilitaries. The narrator of Milkman disrupts the status quo not through being political, heroic or violently opposed, but because she is original, funny, disarmingly oblique and unique: different. The same can be said of this book."

***

The following poems came up more than once in reviewers' comments, so here they are for reference:

-- A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, by Derek Mahon

-- Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, by Seamus Heaney