Milkman by Anna Burns

The realism of this unreal novel is unbearably chilling; yet at times Anna Burns achieves a zany humour. To avoid thinking of the sectarian violence and sexual bullying that she's supposed to accept as normal, the 18-year old female protagonist reads while she walks. Soon this eccentric and socially unsanctioned behaviour causes neighbours to gossip. As another form of escape, she resorts to running. The story darkens as the violently sectarian "Milkman" begins stalking her. For the narrator, changing her route and practice means allowing "religious geography" to constrain her movements. The implicit threat to her is exacerbated by the gossip mill, which inists, without a grain of truth, that she's the lover of the married, middle-aged renouncer of the government.

Meanwhile, the community, including her mother, fail to acknowledge his creepy encroachment on her space. Trained to be polite, the besieged woman finds herself unable to brush off the man: the stalker claims to know her brothers and her father, so must be deemed safe.

In this time and place, "violence was everyone's gauge for judging everyone else." References to routine fighting, drunkenness and violence begin in the first lines of the novel. They hit harder as the the narrator piles on images of decimated families, riots and shootings, like that of "Somebody McSomebody's brother." The protagonist chooses her "maybe boyfriend" because he doesn't get involved in it.

Danger besets this narrator at every turn, and as an intelligent young woman, she does what she can to protect herself. Unfortunately, her carefully constructed protective mechanisms backfire. Her unusual practices (walking while reading, running in the park) are snatched away by the predatory behavior of the Milkman. By then, the emotional walls she has erected have begun to alienate her not only from her nosy neighbours, but from herself.

The description of the suffocating society she inhabits comes out in language like this: "A whole chivvy of mothers trying to get their daughters wed." In this mad place, even for the girl's mother a marriage to a "bigamous terrorist" will do, if it will save her daughter's reputation.

Burns uses the powerful technique of anonymity, never mentioning the specifics of time, place or person. Instead, she refers to the people of the "other religion" who live "over the road," while those who have left the country have gone "over the water." We never learn the name of the protagonist, who refers to the people in her life as Maybe-boyfriend and French Teacher, Tablets Girl and Nuclear Boy, first brother-in-law, second little sister, and so on. Thus the reader can both intuit the real setting and ponder the universal nature of the deeply flawed society Burns so chillingly portrays.

The tension ran high through this book; I both wanted and dreaded to find out what would happen. Yet I couldn't possibly have predicted or even imagined how it would end until it did. Anna Burns grew up in Belfast during the Troubles, and this novel won the 2018 Booker Prize.