In Milkman, Anna Burns presents a world, a nightmarish one at that, where individuals are helpless against implication. Caught in a catch-22; for Burns’ character, to speak up is to become a pariah, but to remain silent is equally as condemning. In Milkman, people are ultimately at the mercy, and the whim, of the crowd and of the powerful entities which sway it. To do anything comes with the implication that harm will befall you. 

Milkman is a claustrophobic story and presents helplessness as a heartbeat which urges on each event in the book. Every moment is an ache, a grotesque ache, which lingers on readers. The setting is immediately hostile, set in 1970’s Northern Ireland, Burns includes multiple hallmarks of oppression in her landscape.

Community, then, can be both appalling and appealing, heroic and horrific. As our main character is a young woman, forced into a relationship with an older man who is a senior paramilitary leader called the ‘Milkman’, because of the threat of violence, abandonment, exile from a community made numb from tyranny and tribalism. Everywhere she looks, he looms, every time she speaks, she is silenced, because the Milkman is everybody’s ally, and the reader doesn’t need to know about the political violence because it manifests itself as distrust, blindness, and patriarchy. It echoes that wonderful quote from the 2005 film Spotlight: “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.” 

But our main character is not a child, barely; she is an 18-year old girl who buries her head in her book and stays out of politics. It is precisely this which makes her community assume she has something to hide, and although her tools of survival are wit and humour, the Milkman tightens his grip on her, threatening to kill her boyfriend, and others feel emboldened to make comments to her, she is embattled; surrounded on all fronts. It is a reflection of a community which feels powerless, manifesting power in any way it can. Milkman is strange, disturbing, and stunningly self aware. Perhaps hard for some readers to grasp as the plot wiggles and wrestles itself from your hands but if you keep going, you will find yourself immersed in a cruel, often terrifying, but also complicatedly beautiful world. Not all is as it seems and, actually, there is goodness which sews the seeds of meaningful change despite the burgeoning froth of violence threatening to overspill at any moment. 

The story can be erratic but it punches hard at the right moments. It is a story of resilience and is funny, very funny. It sinks its teeth into a delicate and complex subject and shows off the cross-section of the bite in all its naked glory. That is where the novel’s strengths lie, in its honesty and bravery. It’s no wonder it won the 2018 Booker prize.

About Anna Burns

Anna Burns was the first Northern Irish writer to win the Booker Prize. Milkman is her third novel and her first, No Bones, is considered an important piece of work depicting the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Her work captures the feelings and language of everyday people in Northern Ireland in a way often compared to Dubliners by James Joyce. 

Burns’ characteristic tone of voice is marked by dark humour, honesty and surrealism which contains within it a potent observation of reality. Her stories are personal, and reflect her own experiences growing up in Northern Ireland. She now lives in East Sussex, England. 

Other works

If you enjoy Milkman by Anna Burns, why not try her earlier two novels, No Bones and Little Constructions? Her dark humour and deep observations shine through in both stories and, although the former is about a woman growing up in Northern Ireland and the latter is about a criminal family, they inherently centre around community, family and the complications of surviving everyday life. 

If you liked this Milkman book review, why not check out our other reviews or have a look at our blog where we cover a range of literary topics?