This experimental
novel won the 2018 Man Booker Prize.
Reading it is tiring because it requires considerable concentration. I found I had to take frequent breaks, but I
couldn’t not finish it.
An unnamed narrator
looks back to her life when she was an 18-year-old living in Northern Ireland
in the late 1970s and experienced what she calls “the downfall of myself.” She is identified only as middle sister, one
of a Catholic family of ten children living in a district which is home to “renouncers-of-the-state.” She is apolitical and tries to ignore her
milieu by reading-while-walking. She
even insists on reading only nineteenth-century books “because I did not like
twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century.”
The narrator’s life
becomes chaotic when a senior paramilitary figure, known as the milkman, takes
an interest in her and starts accosting her in public places. She does all she can to avoid him and never
mentions the unwelcome encounters with him, fearing “trying to explain only to
be misunderstood, or of trying to explain only not to be taken seriously.” Nonetheless, rumours spread that she is
having an affair with him. She refuses
to answer any questions, but that gains her accusations of “displaying an
unamiable Marie Antoinetteness by being stuck-up.” She chooses to ignore the gossip and innuendo
but that doesn’t stop “more gossip, more
fabrication, more elaboration on the deterioration of [her] character.” She realizes that “no matter what I would
have done or could have done, those gossips wouldn’t have stopped, never would they
have ceased and gone away.”
She “had never been
demonstrated to in the healthy delivery of thoughts, needs and emotions,” so
she internalizes her feelings, deciding “it was imperative to present myself as
blank and empty.” There are consequences
to this approach: “my seemingly
flattened approach to life became less a pretence and more and more real as
time went on. . . . an emotional numbness set in.” She comes to realize she had been “thwarted
into a carefully constructed nothingness by that man. Also by the community, by the very mental
atmosphere, that minutiae of invasion.”
Her community is never
specifically identified. I assumed she
lived in Belfast in Northern Ireland
which she calls a statelet oppressed by the military from ‘over the water’. There is also the land ‘over the border’. Her movements are restricted to her district
so she can avoid the enemy, the defender-of-the-state paramilitaries from ‘over
the road’. There is no reference to
Catholic and Protestant, only ‘their religion’ (the wrong religion) and ‘our
religion’ (the right religion). No one
has a name; characters are identified by descriptors such as “first
brother-in-law” or “third sister” or “wee sisters” or “the real milkman” or “the
pious women”. It is as if characters do
not exist as individuals.
The milkman does not
appear very often but he is a creepy presence.
He is “one of our highranking, prestigious dissidents” and “one of our
major influential heroes” so he has a status that the young woman cannot ignore. He appears unexpectedly when she is alone
because he “operated best in cases of isolation.” Though
he says little, he does make clear what about her behaviour (reading-while-walking
and running) he does not like. He knows
all about her: the members of her
family, her workplace, her routines.
Only the subject of her night class does he identify incorrectly: “this was the only thing, ever, in his profiling
of me that the milkman got wrong.” He never directly threatens her but she knows “he
had a plan, some workable agenda.” He
never directly threatens anyone else either, though he does describe a car bomb
killing a car mechanic and then asks for confirmation that the woman’s
maybe-boyfriend is a motor mechanic. He
doesn’t even touch her and that causes a problem too: “having been brought up in a hair-trigger
society where the ground rules were – if no physically violent touch was being
laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and
no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how
could you be under attack from something that wasn’t there?”
The book shows the
realities of living in a society torn by protracted civil unrest. She lives in an “intricately coiled, overly
secretive, hyper-gossipy, puritanical yet indecent, totalitarian district” in a
society “overladen with heaviness and grief and fear and anger.” Everyone is expected to conform so even something
like reading-while-walking is behaviour that is considered eccentric and
inappropriate. There is a great deal of “communal
policing” so people live in constant fear and trust no one. In a lottery, the woman’s maybe-boyfriend wins
a supercharger from a dismantled Bentley and he is suspected of being an
informer because another part from that car would have had a flag from the
country ‘over the water’ on it. The
woman describes her teen years as “paranoid times. These were knife-edge times, primal times,
with everybody suspicious of everybody.”
It is not surprising
that the narrator draws some attention to the role of women in her society. When the milkman first approaches the woman,
he identifies himself: “he knew my
family for he’d named the credentials, the male people of my family.” When he tries to slow down her running, she
finds the pace too slow for her but “I could not say so, however, for I could
not be fitter than this man, could not be more knowledgeable about my own
regime than this man, because the conditioning of males and females here would
never have allowed that.” Women were
considered insolent if “they did not defer to males, did not acknowledge the
superiority of males, might even go so far as to contradict males.” When the woman rejects the advances of
Somebody McSomebody, he blames her for attracting his attention: “You started this. You made us look at you. You made us think . . . ”. A group of women who gather to discuss women’s
issues becomes known as the issue women:
“These women, constituting the nascent feminist group on our area . . .
were firmly placed in the category of those way, way beyond-the-pale. The word ‘feminist’ was beyond-the-pale. The word ‘woman’ barely escaped
beyond-the-pale. . . . Awful things were said about these women with the issues
in our district, not just behind their backs but to their faces as well.”
Despite the serious
subject, there is humour which is used to emphasize the absurdity of the
situation. For example, it is discovered
that a woman has been murdered, and people do not know how to react: “Ordinary murders were eerie, unfathomable,
the exact murders that didn’t happen here . . . because only political murders
happened in this place. . . . Any killing other than political and the
community was in perplexity, also in anxiety, as to how to proceed.” The narrator’s mother worries, “’We’re
turning into that country “over the water”.
Anything happens there. Ordinary
murders happen there. Loose morals
happen there.’”
As I mentioned at the
beginning, this book presents a challenging read. Sentences are very long, as are the
paragraphs and the chapters. Sometimes
it feels as if the reader is trapped inside the narrative and I guess that is a
way of emphasizing the theme. Short
sentences often employ inverted structure:
“Completely therefore, was I thrown by this new line of talk.” The narrative is not linear but moves back
and forth through time. The narrator
repeats and digresses, this disordered narration suggesting her anxiety and
confusion. There are several lists; for
instance, there is a list of over 60 names that are banned in the
community. No attempt is made to include
realistic dialogue: when asking if her
daughter is pregnant, a woman says, “’Have you been fecundated by him . . .
Engendered in. Breeded in. Fertilised, vexed, embarrassed, sprinkled,
caused to feel regret, wished not to have happened – dear God, child, do I have
to spell it out?’”
This is an
unconventional book that demands concentration.
Some reviewer described reading this novel as a “dense reading
experience” and I would agree. I
recommend this book but I advise people to have some light reading on hand to
alternate with sections of Milkman.
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