Standing up for old-fashioned values of black and white morality.
This crazy little nugget from the winner of the Booker prize for Milkman is a brutal Standing up for old-fashioned values of black and white morality.
This crazy little nugget from the winner of the Booker prize for Milkman is a brutal satire of the superhero phenomenon. It ridicules the mindlessness of violence and the glorification of the same in popular culture, and that with a touch of feminism.
Here, the author turns the popular trope on its head, swapping the handsome young male hero with a very old granny-like figure with magnificent powers, who is hell-bent on achieving her goal by any means, possible or literally impossible!
Still eighty-two, still with fifty-seven bullets in her, still dying, and with a blood-trail resembling a post-structuralist anti-principle of a traditional abstracted countercomposition, she was softly cursing and willing herself not to die.
[2.5] The storyline immediately catches the eye: a teenage Irish girl abandons her family, leaves her hometown, and crosses oHer mourning is to wonder.
[2.5] The storyline immediately catches the eye: a teenage Irish girl abandons her family, leaves her hometown, and crosses over to England to find the elusive lover who impregnated her during a brief encounter they had had at home. In England, without knowing the whereabouts of the man and all by herself, she falls prey to one Mr. Hilditch, a middle-aged predator with a dark past who maintains a respectable social profile. This, then, becomes the story of her loss and survival.
But we have heard all that before. Many times over. Knowing William Trevor’s reputation I prepared myself to be awed at the new way of doing the old topic, but unfortunately my desire to enjoy and appreciate this novel was not fulfilled. The writing is good at times, lyrical and evocative, brooding and haunting, but for the most part very ordinary and run-of-the-mill.
The character of Felicia is underdeveloped. She is naïve, innocent, trusting, yet sensible enough to smell danger when things begin to turn. Nothing more can be said of her. It's thinly drawn and two-dimensional, almost a stereotype of a small town young Irish female and feels more like she’s put in there to develop and advance the story of her predator Mr. Hilditch, who, however, is more carefully drawn and passably credible. He is a conniving, deceiving, manipulative man with a stable job but lives a lonely and loveless life. He has a history of preying on the emotionally and financially distressed vulnerable young women. When a new opportunity in the figure of Felicia comes to him, he’s all set to exploit it to the full. Felicia becomes his undoing but the train of events that unravels him does not seem quite plausible to me.
The narrative follows a linear stream with plentiful flashbacks to contextualise their lives and reveal the backstories of both characters. I felt that much of Hilditch’s backstory is withheld to be told much later in order to give it a feel of a thriller rather than a profound exploration of the novel’s themes and its characters’ mental states. These later revelations of important details skew the reading experience of the earlier two-third of the novel.
I have a number of other quibbles with the authorial choices. There is too much info dump of names and places, brands and businesses etc with no real bearing on what's being told, which hinders the smooth reading of the story. For instance, early on, fifteen characters (plus five extra names) are introduced in less than two pages. Only two or three of them are used again in a few inconsequential situations which could easily have been dispensed with. And of places, I do not want to know the names of so many businesses establishments on so many streets just to locate a setting where they dine or meet once or twice, and whose location is absolutely unnecessary anyway to what came before and what is to come after. This kind of detailed geographical mapping and name-naming has its uses but not in the story under question.
Another problem is the author’s slightly irritating narrational choice of beginning a new chapter in medias res. You read a couple of paragraphs full of pronouns to find out what it is that's being talked about. This isn’t a problem per se; it’s just that some writers do it better than others. I didn’t like the confusions of the first few lines, not knowing what I was reading about until a few paragraphs later.
All things considered, it is possible to appreciate this novel for the nature of its topic. It is essentially a sad story of a broken-hearted young girl who finds no redemption and is lost to the vagaries of fate. You would shed a tear or two at Fecilia's fate as you turn the last page. No wonder the book is so popular.
Life here, said real milkman, simply has to be lived and died in extremes.
Northern Ireland. Unnamed Belfast. The TrWINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018
Life here, said real milkman, simply has to be lived and died in extremes.
Northern Ireland. Unnamed Belfast. The Troubles. 1970s. A young woman navigates the violent and all-consuming political conflict by trying to steer clear of it, having contrived to shut off herself, emotionally and intellectually, from the sordid reality of her surroundings. She is shaken out of her somnolence when a paramilitary leader, the eponymous Milkman, ostensibly develops an amorous interest in her. And there ensues a whirlwind of incidents that, against her will, pulls her into the limelight and pits her against the power centres of society. The narrator recounts her experience and the emotional toll it took on her to pass through the ordeal and come out the other end, bruised and battered.
The picture that emerges is of a dystopia wherein gossip, mistrust, and paranoia metamorphose into undeniable truths in what then becomes an increasingly fictitious world that is masquerading as harsh reality in which everyone has to play their set part at any and all cost, which in turn fuels and perpetuates the very conflict which had engendered it. This cyclical and chaotic nature of reality is skillfully rendered in the narrative voice which is itself unordered, meandering, circuitous, repetitive and at times self-referential. It is the kind of book whose reception depends mainly or solely on how well one receives the narrative voice.
Anna Burns has managed to avoid the pitfalls of the recycled novel with the choice of her style, which isn’t really as experimental and groundbreakingly new as it's been made out to be in the press, but a loosely held interior monologue with an oral - or aural - quality, as though the story is being related to a group of listeners. It does feel odd now and then, but not odd enough to cause any difficulty to the reader.
But more important is how the stylistic choice is made to work to convey the personal and the intimate and as well as the sociopolitical dynamics of that place at that time; and also the extent to which the banal and tedious details of politics are creatively passed on to the reader through that stylistic choice. The descriptive identifiers for various groups cleverly delineate and depict the social and political faultlines, i.e; intercommuncal violence, sectarian killings, oppressive conventions, social taboos, misuse of power for non-political ends etc whilst keeping us close to the heart of the narrator.
From general and easily-understood euphemisms like renouncers, defenders, the country over the border, the country across the water to more specific ones like "groupie women" for militants’ paramours, "issue women" for newly rising feminism in the area, "beyond-the-pale ones" for misfits that defy rules and refuse to conform to strict convention etc - all this worked to keep my interest in the story which I might otherwise have lost if told with a more politically overt commentary.
No attempt is made to maintain verisimilitude in dialogue. Character voices are indistinguishable from one another, which takes away from the authenticity of direct speech. The narrator is deliberately reporting “altered speech” to create effect and highlight the craziness of the situation, but not without a good deal of humour. For example when ma assumes the narrator to be pregnant she says, 'Have you been fecundated by him, by that renouncer,' ... , 'imbued by him,' she elaborated. 'Engendered in. Breeded in. Fertilised, vexed, embarrassed, sprinkled, caused to feel regret, wished not to have happened - dear God, child, do I have to spell it out?' Well, why didn't she spell it out? Why couldn't she just say pregnant?”
This shows her reluctance to discuss a taboo matter directly but this line is written so to highlight that fact and couldn’t have spoken by the mother as direct speech, even if it is reported as such, in quotation marks, if we keep her previous speech patterns and working class background in mind. Similarly, there are lines said by wee sisters that show their curious minds but that's not how children speak. As one wee sister tells our narrator, “Somebody for you called maybe-boyfriend rang up,” or when the narrator tells maybe-boyfriend, “Stop the car on this deserted interface road immediately." This a small sample of the roundabout, ridiculous, and funny pronouncements peppered throughout the book.
Oftentimes the story reads like a testament to the resilience of the people to maintain a semblance of normalcy to their surroundings against all odds, such as when disenfranchised groups step up and intervene when things threaten to breakdown into total madness, or into more total madness. Groups of women, otherwise conservative housewives sick of the curfews, a random band of women at the drinking-club, or the “issue women,” – all these spring into action from time to time to rein in things and assert their right to have a say at great personal risk.
It is difficult to ignore the discordance caused by the sudden shifts of register throughout the narrative. For instance, in-between informal, repetitive, and less-than-perfect usage of standard words, as well as in dialogue, one gets to read erudite and high-flying sentences like, “I added there’d been a synchronicity to it, a sense of providence, a deftness, some cosmic comeuppance easily to be described as pure alchemical process.” followed by, on the same page, 'Not necessary,' I said. 'Still,' he said. 'Ach nothing,' he said. 'Ach sure,' I said. 'Ach sure what?' he said. 'Ach sure, if that's how you feel.' 'Ach sure, of course that's how I feel.' 'Ach, all right then,' he said... and it goes on. But I did not find this to lessen my enjoyment of the story.
Much has been said about its supposed difficulty but it’s not any more difficult than your - by now - regular stream of consciousness novels. On comparison with other such novels, such as another Booker winner, The Gathering, this novel felt like a relatively easy read. Yes, it's unconventional, but not impenetrable. I have also seen it said that it's difficult to understand if you're not Irish or native English speaker. This is patent falsehood. As a non-native English speaker as well as non-Irish, I had no more difficulty understanding the language or the literary and sociocultural references than I had, say, in Ian McEwan's novels. I did not need to google anything besides "jamais vu" (because it's French and I don't know French), and informal terms like "supergrass" and why would someone say "gee-whizz" instead of "Jesus." It wouldn't have made any difference anyway had I not looked them up. So perhaps we need to refashion the question to purpose and ask, "Who's Afraid of Anna Burns?"
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