Milkman
Anna Burns, 2018
Graywolf Press
360 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781644450000
Summary
Winner, 2018 Man Booker Prize
In an unnamed city, middle sister stands out for the wrong reasons. She reads while walking, for one. And she has been taking French night classes downtown.
So when a local paramilitary known as the milkman begins pursuing her, she suddenly becomes “interesting,” the last thing she ever wanted to be.
Despite middle sister’s attempts to avoid him―and to keep her mother from finding out about her maybe-boyfriend―rumors spread and the threat of violence lingers.
Milkman is a story of the way inaction can have enormous repercussions, in a time when the wrong flag, wrong religion, or even a sunset can be subversive. Told with ferocious energy and sly, wicked humor, Milkman establishes Anna Burns as one of the most consequential voices of our day. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1962
• Where—Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
• Education—studied Russian, no degree
• Awards—Man Booker Prize
• Currently—lives in East Sussex, England
Anna Burns is the the author of several novels, most famously, Milkman (2018) for which she won the 2018 Man Booker Prize, the first author from Northern Ireland to do so.
Burns was born in Belfast to a working-class family with seven children. She lived with her aunt nearby, an arrangement not uncommon among large Irish families with small homes and an arrangement that gave Burns quiet time to read after a day with her raucous siblings.
The family was a bookish one, Burns told the UK's Guardian during an interview, and library cards were precious family commodities. Someone was forever taking someone else's card in order to sign out extra books.
Burns left Belfast for London where she studied Russian. She never attained a degree, however. Turning to writing was almost serendipitous. One morning she woke up and began to record her dream in a beautiful sketchbook she'd bought sometime before. One page, then another page; then she began keeping a sort of journal about the day.
In 2002 Burns published her first novel, No Bones; the novel was shortlisted for the (then) Orange Prize. Constructions came next in 2007 and Milkman in 2018.
Four years before Milkman, however, a surgical injury had left Burns with excruciating back pain, and she found herself unable to write. Struggling to make ends meet, she house-sat for various people around England and was forced to depend on food banks. The pain was so bad, she was unsure she would be able to finish Milkman.
When Burns finally completed the novel, it was turned down by several publishers before being taken up by Graywolf Press. Then along came the Man Booker Prize and £50,000. (Adapted from various sources online, primarily The Guardian.)
Book Reviews
A “challenging, experimental” novel that might be easier to understand if read aloud has brought Northern Ireland its first success in the Man Booker prize. Milkman by Anna Burns was the “unanimous” choice of the panel of jurors, whose chairman, Kwame Anthony Appiah, said that it was “enormously rewarding…if you persist with it.”
David Sanderson - Times (UK)
[A] strange and intriguing novel that tackles the Northern Ireland conflict from the perspective of an 18-year-old girl.... Milkman calls to mind several seminal works of Irish literature.... But for all the comparisons, Milkman has its own energy, its own voice.... The narrator...is original, funny, disarmingly oblique and unique: different. The same can be said of this book.
Claire Kilroy - Guardian (UK)
Eccentric and oddly beguiling.… What makes it memorable is the funny, alienated, common-sensical voice of middle sister, who refuses to join in the madness.
Sunday Times (UK)
Milkman is delivered in a breathless, hectic, glorious torrent.… It’s an astute, exquisite account of Northern Ireland’s social landscape.… A potent and urgent book, with more than a hint of barely contained fury.
Irish Independent
I haven’t stopped talking about Anna Burns’s astonishing Milkman. The voice is dazzling, funny, acute.… Like all great writing it invents its own context, becomes its own universe.
Eoin McNamee - Irish Times
From the opening page her words pull us into the daily violence of her world—threats of murder, people killed by state hit squads—while responding to the everyday realities of her life as a young woman.
Kwame Anthony Appiah - Chair, Man Booker Prize panel
[A]n acute, chilling, and often wry portrait of a young woman—and a district—under siege.… There is a touch of James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus in the… narrator of this claustrophobic yet strangely buoyant tale.… This is an unforgettable novel.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for MILKMAN … then take off on your own:
m. Describe middle-sister. She's 18 years old and bookish. What else? She says she prefers 19th century books "because I did not like the 20th century." What does that statement (or any of her others) suggest about her?
m. What is it about the middle-sister that draws Milkman to her? Reviewers call him creepy. Do you agree? How else would you describe him: agressive, violent, obsessive intimidating ... all of the above, none of the above, something else?
m. When Milkman finally prevails in his pursuit, middle-sister says, "I'd been thwarted into a carefully constructed nothingness by that man. Also by the commuity, by the very mental atmosphere, that minutiae of invastion." There's a lot to unpack in that sentence, which encapsulates the primary tension within the novel. Care to talk about what the statement means, say, phrase by phrase?
m. How would you describe the society in which the book is set (presumaly Belfast, though never acknowledged). Consider the city's atmosphere, the sense of totalitarian oppression.
m. The book is concerned with power. How does power operate in Milkman—on a personal as well as societal level? Who has power and for what purpose? How is power used and over whom?
m. Milkman is also about tribalism. Talk about how group identity functions in this novel. Consider the us versus them allegiances, even down to the brand of butter or tea.
m. Did you find the author's stream-of-consciousness style difficult?
m. What about the lack of character names? The author says that in her initial writing that she used names, but that the book never worked until she removed them. Why might the writing have gone more smoothly without names? Does the lack of names lend a dystopian quality to the work?
m. The author wrote Milkman years before the onset of the #MeToo movement, yet its subject of sexual predation is timely. How did you experience the book in light of today's more aware society. How might you have read it several years ago…or even (if you're old enough) 40 years ago when the events of the book supposedly (thought not specifically) take place?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)