No Bones by Anna Burns

A few bare bones: this sister was called Amelia, she was seventeen, she never ate any food, suffered constant tummy aches, didn't understand why and was outrageously, sexually tin. She came in the door with that arm-swinging vigour all six-stone hunger-strikers are very keen on--or at least while on one of their extraordinary highs. So it could be said she was happy till that moment. Catching sight of her relatives however, she stopped being happy, stopped swinging her arms and her high dissipated in an instant.

The neighborhood of Ardoyne is one of the hardest hit by the three decades called, in Belfast and Northern Ireland, the Troubles. A teenager Amelia stops on the street to make out with a young man, and as soon as she leaves him, a car full of Protestants snatches him an executes him. A British cousin, having visited Amelia's family with open arms just a few years before, makes the mistake of repeating the visit, and finds himself murdered by his own family. Deaths pile up on themselves so quickly that they are quickly forgotten: "Everyone said wasn't it terrible, wasn't it a waste, wouldn't it always be remembered? But it wouldn't. And it wasn't. Everything got eclipsed, always got eclipsed, by the next, most recent, violent death."

No Bones is, like Anna Burns' subsequent and Booker-winning novel Milkman, about the ways that human psychology curdles in an environment of constant violence. The people of Ardoyne live in a state of constant denial and obfuscation; to live among the daily deaths requires them not to look too squarely at what's going on. It forces them to minimize the significance of violence; though one moment they may be cry about the wasted lives, their existence forces them to move on quickly as if this were a normal kind of life. It forces them to become inward, closed-off, and provincial. In the novel's final story, Amelia, having grown up and spent some time in London, comes back home and suggests that her old friends hire a car and take a holiday, an idea so strange and foreign to their understanding that they can barely understand what it is she's suggesting. (This story resolves in a clever way: instead of being "opened up" by the outside world, the friends find themselves on a ferry to a small island town off the Northern Irish coast, where the residents assume they are Protestants, or outsiders at any rate, and try to bully them off the island. What reforms their understanding, then, is coming face-to-face with a community as warped and defensive as their own.)

I was impressed by No Bones. It doesn't have the power of Milkman, which seems to me to take many of the same elements of No Bones and focuses them into a work with a singular nature. No Bones, by contrast, is organized as a series of stories, in some of which Amelia is the central character, or even the narrator, and others in which she appears at the margins. This method, on the other hand, allows Burns to play around with some of the more experimental elements of the novel, as with a story from the perspective of Vincent, a "mad" local whose viewpoint shifts between fantasy and reality in a way that I found really skillful and effective. Amelia herself is a kind of "madwoman," mentally warped by her community and a lifelong battle with anorexia; in one story she's in a mental clinic, imagining her brother--a crass and violent man who gets mixed up with the IRA--as a kind of beetle-like creature munching on her own flesh. Of course, it's just this kind of madness that gives Amelia the outsider's perspective she needs to see through the insanity of the way things are done in Ardoyne--only a madwoman could conceive of a plan as crazy as renting a car and going to the seaside.