Milkman by Anna Burns

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.  He had been shot by one of the state hit squads and I did not care about the shooting of this man.  Others did care though, and some were those who, in the parlance, 'knew me to see but not to speak to' and I was being talked about because there was a rumour started by them, or more likely by first brother-in-law, that I had been having an affair with this milkman and that I was eighteen and he was forty-one.  I knew his age, but not because he got shot and it was given by the media, but because there had been talk of this, for months before the shooting, by these people of the rumour, that forty-one and eighteen was disgusting, that twenty-three years' difference was disgusting, that he was married and not to be fooled by me for there was plenty of quiet, unnoticeable people who took a bit of watching.  It had been my fault too, it seemed, this affair with the milkman.  But I had not been having an affair with the milkman.  I did not like the milkman and had been frightened and confused by his pursuing and attempting an affair with me.

Twice in a week, middle sister, the protagonist of Anna Burns' novel is invited to see a sunset.  This, to her, is strange--it's not something do, watching the sun go down.  Once, she's invited by maybe-boyfriend, and once by her French teacher, who is trying to get her entire class to see what they stubbornly refuse to see.  The sky is blue, the class insists, even though they know it can also be "black (the night sky) and white (cloudy)," but as middle sister says, "It was the convention not to admit it, not to accept detail for this type of detail would mean choice and choice would mean responsibility and what if we failed in our responsibility?  Failed too, in the interrogation of the consequence of seeing more than we could cope with?"  The sunset stands in here for everything her Catholic community in Northern Ireland refuses to see, to cope with, to find the language for.  And yet, the sky is all sorts of colors when you really look at it.

Milkman is a novel about the way that community, especially at times of intense violence and sectarian division, controls and determines the way we see and think.  This is reflected in Burns' funny choice not to give any of the characters names: Middle sister, maybe-boyfriend, first brother, third brother, Somebody McSomebody, milkman, the real milkman, also known as the man who didn't love anybody.  There is an official list of permitted names, middle sister explains, meant to keep "renouncers" from giving their kids names from "over the water," and in the end it's easier just to not name anything at all for fear of reprisal.  Middle sister, for her part, is known for her peculiar habit of reading while walking, another way of turning one's face from the facts.  It's always a nineteenth century novel, we're told, because she "did not like the twentieth century at all."

Rumor, too, is a way of forcing the world to cohere to acceptable modes of being.  The action of the novel is sparked by the milkman, a famed renouncer paramilitant who takes a sudden sexual interest in middle sister.  He appears suddenly and without warning, sometimes with cronies and sometimes alone, sometimes on foot and sometimes in his white van.  Rumor and gossip transform stalking into an affair, and an affair with a paramilitant is a dangerous thing to pursue.  Milkman is the story of how these rumors destabilize middle sister's life, throwing a wrench in her relationship with maybe-boyfriend, her mother, her community, and in her own conception of herself.

There is the frightening suggestion that the narrative of the community can overcome someone's own story about herself, reduce her to nothingness.  This fear is circumscribed by violence, and not just the historically particular violence of Northern Ireland but the everyday violence that men impose on women.  The way that rumor threatens to overpower middle sister is reproduced here, in this country, all the time, by the powers of rape culture.  I agree with Chloe, who writes that it's frustrating to watch middle sister let "rumors build and swirl around her," but how many women women in our place and time lack the language or the trust to clearly articulate what it is that menaces them also?

For all that, the novel is incredibly funny and engaging.  It has itself a kind of garrulous gossipy quality to it, and I can't think of many books that do a better job matching theme and voice.  The sentences are long, digressive, redundant, oblique, but all those qualities suggest just how difficult it is to come right to the point and see what's in front of one's face.  "The truth was dawning on me of how terrifying it was not to be numb," middle sister explains, "but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, be present, be adult."  And despite that it retains a kind of fresh and exuberant language that really propels the book forward.

It ends weirdly, well after the milkman's death--that's not a spoiler, it's in the first line of the book--but all that violence and gossip continue well after he's gone.  We get the violent confrontation we were expecting, but not between middle sister and the milkman, but between middle sister and Somebody McSomebody, a nothing punk who only pretends to be a paramilitant.  His attack is weak, scuttled, but it's a testament to the power of narratives to outlive those who create them, and we come to understand that things are not going to go back to "normal" for middle sister.  But maybe, Burns suggests, she might be a little more aware about what is so strange about normal, and how much more there is to see in the world.