Milkman by anna burns, review: a viciously funny take on the troubles

Cal Revely-Calder 01 June 2018 7:00am BST This is not exactly Belfast. The "renouncers" here aren't exactly the IRA, the "defenders" aren't exactly the Army.

Yes, it's the Seventies, and we're in a "hair-trigger society" of bomb scares, hijackings, talk of "our community" and "their community", electrified

signals "of murals, of traditions, of newspapers, of anthems", right up to the spectre of "the soldiery, the paramilitary" – but nothing must be named. In Milkman, Anna

Burns's Man Booker Prize-winning darkly comic novel, names are black magic, and silence is better. You might call this place a region, or a province, or six counties, or the North of

something else – but whatever you say, you'll brand yourself. Not even our narrator has a name. We find out she's 18, female, a middle sister, even that her community is among

those "renouncers" – "the only time you'd call the police in my area would be if you were going to shoot them" – but it's a mystery how she was baptised. Her

dog can have a name (Lassie), as can her classmates at night school in town, but her "maybe-boyfriend" cannot. The world of Milkman is one where communal bonds are truer than those

of the heart. And yet, for all her self-censored narration, "middle sister" is thought to have unreliably starry eyes. She carries around a cat's head while deciding where to

bury it, or walks home with her own head buried in a novel by Walter Scott. Over the water, or in a city to the south, you might drift around like that, but this is a place where no one has

time for kooks. Her "longest friend" collars her on the reading-while-walking thing: "It's disturbing. It's deviant." Our heroine is perturbed. "Hold on a

minute. Are you saying it's okay for him to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read Jane Eyre in public?" "Longest friend" dismisses her. "Semtex

isn't unusual. It's not not to be expected." Milkman, the "him" going around with Semtex, is a "renouncer", and a ranking one at that. He causes a plot to

emerge in the narrator's life, by stalking her – she doesn't know why, and does nothing to lead him on – which, in turn, triggers a wave of gossip and innuendo. Soon enough,

she's suspected of being "the little Frenchwoman, the arriviste, the hussy", of entering "paramilitary groupiedom". Six actual groupies collar her in the club

lavatories, and rhapsodise chummily about the glamour of it, the buzz. "They said my name then, my first name... And there I was, in the middle of them – one of them." Too late to

escape. The pace of Milkman is leisurely at best, because its narrator experiences the plot as an entirely unwelcome event. When she's not avoiding Milkman – joining her on her run,

pulling up to offer her a lift – she's bumbling about, trying to ignore everyone's sour looks. All the better for us; Burns has time to paint a colourful social scene, full of

"beyond-the-pales" into whose ranks our heroine is tossed. One of her brothers-in-law keeps visiting nuns, to ask "masturbating questions disguised as harmless cultural

queries about art". "Tablets girl" wanders the back rooms of pubs, looking for drinks to spike. "Nuclear boy" is a 15-year-old who harbours "a strange Cold War

obsession", and his elder brother is "Somebody McSomebody", who refers to himself as an omnipotent "we". Anna Burns: from bankruptcy and food banks to winning the

Booker Prize But the standout character is the narrator's mother, instantly recognisable on both sides of the border this novel won't name. She's a blend of principle,

neurosis, and raging love, so implacably opposed to her daughter's affair with Milkman that she can't believe it doesn't exist. Then again, maybe that's not the issue.

"If I really felt I had to cleave to a renouncer," it's suggested, "could I not officially have gotten myself married to him?" Or maybe that's no better, the

mother frets: "Look at yer woman round the corner. You could say she loved all her saturnine husbands, but where are they now? Where are most of those women's brooding,

single-minded, potently implacable husbands? Again, six feet under in the freedom fighters' plot of the usual place." He's not just a paramilitary, but worse – a married man.

Milkman is viciously funny. Its jokes come out askew, as does its plot. We know that Milkman himself will die from the very first page, just as we know that McSomebody will assault the

narrator in the ladies' room. But one is the plot, and one is a passing thing; Burns likes the peculiarities of the latter. Eventually we reach Milkman's shooting, and it's

barely worth a shrug. But when McSomebody gets dragged away and kicked half to death by supportive women – now that, by contrast, is a lovely surprise. MILKMAN BY ANNA BURNS IS PUBLISHED BY

FABER & FABER AT £14.99. TO ORDER YOUR COPY FOR £12.99, CALL 0844 871 1514 OR VISIT THE ONLINE TELEGRAPH BOOKSHOP