This year’s Man Booker Prize goes to Milkman by the Irish author Anna Burns. Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Anna Burns had previously published two novels, No Bones and Little Constructions, which had received huge critical acclaim. Set in an unnamed city of Northern Ireland, most probably Belfast, Milkman evokes the strife torn atmosphere of the period known as The Troubles in 1970s which had spilled over into 1990s also, the key issue being the disagreement between Catholics and Protestants about the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. It tells the story of the 18-year old unnamed narrator who navigates through the tension and turmoil that characterise the period. Though restricted in space and time, the novel’s scope manages to transcend the limits.
Milkman is an experimental novel par excellence. This first person, stream of conscience narrative has achieved a unique distinction by its overall consistency of style and approach. Curiously everything in the novel is unnamed. The characters are referred to in various devious ways. The narrator refers to herself as the “ middle sister”. Her mother is ‘Ma’ and her father, ‘Da’. The very start of the novel baffles the reader. The first sentence reads: “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.” (p.1) The details about the eponymous character are also intriguing, as Milkman does not refer to any real milkman: “I didn’t know whose milkman he was. He wasn’t our milkman. I don’t think he was anybody’s. He didn’t take milk orders. There was no milk about him. He didn’t ever deliver milk…” (p.2)
Belfast background
It is not for the sake of stylistic experiment that this novel could be called experimental. The author’s stylistic options go hand in hand with her attempt to highlight the day-to-day obsessions, precautions and preoccupations of her country. Bomb scare looms large in the background. “At first the explosion had puzzled everybody. What was the point? There was no point. Why plant a bomb, said all the parties in a dead, creepy, grey place that everybody knew was dead…?” (p.82). Holocaust is also mentioned: “Of course the whole household knew that the Holocaust and the world wars and animals eating other animals, all those anaesthetics which also included our political problems…” (p.87) In order to cope with the precarious social surroundings, the eighteen-year old narrator has got into the habit of walking along the street reading a nineteenth century novel (she doesn’t like twentieth century ones!),shunning all unwanted attention. Despite all the precautions, she gets noticed by a dangerous stalker known in the area as Milkman. This creepy 41-year-old married man is the real source of trouble. Rumour industry takes hold of the situation focusing everybody’s attention on the girl, until finally the Milkman dies.
The subject of this novel that describes a particular situation in a particular country, at a particular historical moment slowly becomes a subject of universal interest. The story of the narrator’s attempt to keep off the world events and her inability to do so sounds allegorical. It puts us in mind of John Donne: “Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee." In this novel where nothing really happens except the infernal rounds of gossip and rumor-mongering, a series of debates and discussions takes place about the world situation and human life into it. At the beginning of the chapter 3, the narrator describes her adult evening French class. The teacher was reading from a French book “to get us used to what authentic French sounded like”. This was a literary passage about the sky. One of the students interrupts her. “I’m confused,” he said. “Is that passage about the sky? If it is about the sky then why doesn’t the writer just say so… when all he needs to say is that the sky is blue?” But the teacher makes the students go to the window and see the sky for themselves. The disturbed students discover that the sky is pink, lemon, mauve and orange-red! Like the teacher in the story, the author of the book would have us confront a world that has no definite color or contour.
The book is studded also with strange and serious comments on life. One could hear Ma saying: “You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth, get on with life, pull yourself together, be respected. “ (p.85). The narrator herself comments on his father’s attitude to life and concludes: “…yet most people I knew weren’t happy. Neither in this workaday world, in this little human-being world, did we spend time counting blessings and eschewing the relative in favour of the eternal.”(p.88)
The challenging day-to-day life led by the people involved in a conflicted city is also highlighted in the novel: “There was no getting away from views and of course, the problem was these views between the areas, between one side and the other, were not just the same. It was that each was intolerant of the other to the extent that highly volatile, built-up contentions periodically would result from them; the reason why too, if you didn’t want to get into that explosive upsurge despite your view which you couldn’t help having, you had to have manners and exercise politeness to overcome, or at any rate balance out, the violence, the hatred and the blaming – for how to live otherwise? This was not schizophrenia. This was living otherwise. This was underneath the trauma and the darkness a normality trying to happen.” (p.112)
The great Ghanaian-American philosopher and novelist, the Chair of judges, Kwame Anthony Appiah has rightly said: “Burns draws on the experience of Northern Ireland during the Troubles to portray a world that allows individuals to abuse the power granted by a community to those who resist the state on their behalf. Yet this is never a novel about just one place or time. The local is in service to an exploration of the universal experience of societies in crisis.”
Incidentally, with all its feminist streaks and focus on the harassment a girl is subjected to, the novel will certainly vindicate the claims of the Me Too which gathers momentum all over the world.
Overall, Anna Burns’ challenging new novel provides a rich and rewarding experience in reading.
The writer is former dean, school of humanities, and Head of Dept of French, Pondicherry University
