![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Milkman - Anna Burns
Jan. 3rd, 2019 05:09 pmSince I spent New Year’s Eve bingeing Derry Girls on Netflix, I decided to stick with the theme of the Northern Ireland conflict for my first book of 2019: Milkman by Anna Burns.
It took me a while to get used to the stream-of-consciousness-style narration and the narrator’s quirk of referring to nothing by name – even the other characters in the book, for example, are referred to as maybe-boyfriend, the milkman, first/second/third sister, the man who doesn’t love anybody, Somebody McSomebody, etc. – but it's a fantastic book, and one I already know I'll want to re-read.
Set in a Catholic neighborhood in an unnamed town in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the main plot of the novel centers on a teenage girl being stalked by an older, high-ranking paramilitary, who the whole town already believes her to be having an affair with, leaving her increasingly isolated and losing her grip. There was also second layer to the novel, which explores the everyday unrealities of life during the Troubles – how something as basic as your name can identify you as "one of Us/Them"; how the fear of authority extends so far that anyone who goes to the hospital is suspected as an informer, how quickly an accusation can take on a life of its own – and the stories of other people in her neighborhood. You get a sense of how their community has been left fractured and paranoid, and the impact that has the way people interact and how they cope.
In many ways, Milkman kind of reminds me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, in the sense that they both explore how society, or at least the opinion of the collective, impacts the individual. In both novels, a community collectively seizes onto a rumor and behaves as if it is true, creating a false sense of inevitability that ultimately impacts the outcome. I also keep thinking of Chronicle’s theme of machismo and the victimization of women, since a major plot point in Milkman is that the narrator initially has no idea how to deal with her stalker since - to paraphrase - he’s not physically hurting her and he’s not verbally harassing her and he’s made no explicit threats to do so, so nothing is really happening, is it? (Yes. Yes, it is.)
Unlike Chronicle of a Death Foretold, however, Milkman has a surprisingly sweet and positive ending! It definitely plants the seeds for the narrator's healing and foreshadows the eventual healing of the country as a whole.
It took me a while to get used to the stream-of-consciousness-style narration and the narrator’s quirk of referring to nothing by name – even the other characters in the book, for example, are referred to as maybe-boyfriend, the milkman, first/second/third sister, the man who doesn’t love anybody, Somebody McSomebody, etc. – but it's a fantastic book, and one I already know I'll want to re-read.
Set in a Catholic neighborhood in an unnamed town in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the main plot of the novel centers on a teenage girl being stalked by an older, high-ranking paramilitary, who the whole town already believes her to be having an affair with, leaving her increasingly isolated and losing her grip. There was also second layer to the novel, which explores the everyday unrealities of life during the Troubles – how something as basic as your name can identify you as "one of Us/Them"; how the fear of authority extends so far that anyone who goes to the hospital is suspected as an informer, how quickly an accusation can take on a life of its own – and the stories of other people in her neighborhood. You get a sense of how their community has been left fractured and paranoid, and the impact that has the way people interact and how they cope.
In many ways, Milkman kind of reminds me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, in the sense that they both explore how society, or at least the opinion of the collective, impacts the individual. In both novels, a community collectively seizes onto a rumor and behaves as if it is true, creating a false sense of inevitability that ultimately impacts the outcome. I also keep thinking of Chronicle’s theme of machismo and the victimization of women, since a major plot point in Milkman is that the narrator initially has no idea how to deal with her stalker since - to paraphrase - he’s not physically hurting her and he’s not verbally harassing her and he’s made no explicit threats to do so, so nothing is really happening, is it? (Yes. Yes, it is.)
Unlike Chronicle of a Death Foretold, however, Milkman has a surprisingly sweet and positive ending! It definitely plants the seeds for the narrator's healing and foreshadows the eventual healing of the country as a whole.
