Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

A little warning. I am breaking my own rules here, as I promise "Something Old" will feature books four or more years old. This week's "Something Old" features a book one year old - but I hope you will accept this posting as it was a book that received little attention in New Zealand - and I will deal similarly with other books like this in the "Something Old" spot as the fancy moves me.

“MILKMAN” by Anna Burns (first published 2018)

            I suppose somebody somewhere has made a study of the role of the milkman in low-brow humour. Time was, milk was delivered to homes rather than being bought in supermarkets. And time was, married mothers were mainly at home when their husbands were out at work. So to the advent of merry exchanges such as “Her youngest doesn’t look like his dad.” “Ooo, it must have been the milkman.” Thus was cemented into old-fashioned music-hall ribaldry the image of the milkman as a cheerful, libidinous chap willing to do all manner of services for wives stuck at home.

            Anna Burns’ Milkman quite consciously and deliberately plays on this image as one of its main motifs, and I’m not sure that in its denouement, or at least in its last forty pages or so, this motif doesn’t capsize an otherwise fine novel. But I’ll save my grumbles about this until later, so that I can expand on the novel’s general excellence.

            As you probably know, Milkman won the 2018 Booker Prize, and has been lavishly, but not unanimously, praised. Among the minority of dissenters there was one particularly grumpy review in the New York Times, by Dwight Garner, which condemned the novel thus: “[Anna] Burns expands this material into a willfully demanding and opaque stream-of-consciousness novel, one that circles and circles its subject matter, like a dog about to sit, while rarely seizing upon any sort of clarity or emotional resonance. I found Milkman to be interminable, and would not recommend it to anyone I liked.”

Ah yes, it is written in a circumlocutious style, but goodness, it works – regardless of Garner’s remarks.

Milkman is set in Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” in the 1970s but, as every reviewer has already told you, there are no specific names. The city in which the action takes place is never named (although it is clearly Belfast). The warring factions are never named, though the “defenders” of the state are clearly Protestant Ulster Unionists and all their paramilitary supporters (UDF etc.), and the “renouncers” of the state are clearly Catholic Irish Nationalists and all their paramilitary supporters (IRA etc.). As for the unnamed “country over the water”, it is England.

Requiring even more concentration of the reader is the fact that the characters, too, are nameless. The narrator is an 18-year-old girl, though some hints in the story tell us her narrative is retrospective and she is looking back at events from some time later. She refers to herself only as “middle sister”, to her widowed mother as “ma”, to her siblings as “third sister” and as the “wee sisters” (a trio of eccentric youngsters literate beyond their years) and she refers ironically, in the novel’s opening sentence, to a man who committed violence against her as “Somebody McSomebody”. She identifies her boyfriend as “maybe-boyfriend”, which may, among other things, suggest her reluctance to fully commit to somebody in a society which assumes that any intimate relationship should lead promptly to marriage and having children. For this is very definitely a novel about a young woman who, as well as stepping cautiously through the tribal and clan loyaties of the “Troubles”, is negotiating her way through late adolescence and problems posed by sex.

Despite the lack of names, her family, tribe and neighbourhood are clearly Catholic nationalists.

“Middle sister” in fact wants to separate herself from the political violence and tensions that surround her. Her chief form of escapism is reading nineteenth-century novels (many of which are referenced in the text). In itself this is regarded as eccentric by her family and neighbours – but even worse, she has the habit of walking around the neighbourhood as she reads. Enter a really creepy middle-aged man, who kerb-crawls and stalks her and wants her to get into his car, despite her repeated requests that he leave her alone. He is identified as Milkman. Is he an informer for the state, trying to get information from her about her neighbourhood where “resisters” stack arms and sometimes plan violence? Or is he himself a well-informed member of some paramilitary group? Or is he just a dirty old man who picks up teenage girls? The sexual threat is as potent as the political one.

Additional trouble for “middle sister”, however, is that though she has no sexual relationship with this threatening man, in no time rumour and gossip say she has. She finds herself having to defend herself from accusations made by family and friends about her immorality and loose-living. And this is where the whole technique of having no names begins to make sense. In a watched and besieged society divided into tribes, threatened by violence (from “your” paramilitaries and the other side’s – and from the police), stirred by gossip and rumour and with strong incentives to conform or suffer the consequences – the safest thing to do is to keep your head down and remain anonymous. You don’t want to become a “name”. You don’t want to be singled out by all the people who are watching you and ready to report on behaviour disloyal to the tribe. Consider what happens to “maybe-boyfriend” when he acquires a supercharger from an ancient Bentley Blower racing car. He and the car-enthusiast lads may be interested, but as soon as one neighbour points out it’s an English car, and therefore from enemy country, “maybe-boyfriend” is under suspicion as a possible traitor.

As well as breeding fear, this sort of society breeds neuroses. Milkman is filled characters who are not coping, eccentric or on the verge of madness – “poison girl” who goes about the neighbourhood literally slipping poison into people’s drinks;  “chef” a (possibly gay) youth who goes through the pantomime of preparing elaborate non-existent meals; a boy obsessed to the point of insanity with the rivalry between America and the Soviet Union over nuclear weapons; and a milkman (the “real milkman”, not to be confused with Milkman the stalker) who apparently hates everybody. But there’s an odd note here, for as Milkman tells it, it is the eccentric ones, the “beyond-the-pales”, the nonconformists and oddballs, who are most likely to change things for the better. This message doesn’t come in slogan form. Women in the neighbourhood trying to set up a feminist discussion group are shut down by the older women and the suspicious paramiltiaries, but the epsode is treated as black farce rather than sermon. Even so, in the end those who hold their heads highest are those who slip around the community’s tightest rules.

And having laid out blandly what the novel is about, I have missed the most important element of its success. This is its tone of voice. Despite Dwight Garner’s negative comment, this novel is not “stream-of-consciousness”. The first-person voice of “middle sister” does not roam at random through sensations and events as they come to her. “Middle sister” may be garrulous, verbose, ready with the detailed and colourful metaphors and capable of exaggeration – but her narrative has a clear structure flowing in a certain direction. In other words, it has a clear plot. The voice is a distinctly Irish one, and I do not think you can really understand this novel if you do not hear a young Irishwoman’s voice in your head as you read. I was going to pad out this review by quoting at length so examples of “middle sister’s” delightful, witty, ironic and shrewd analyses of her community, but I will leave you to find them for yourself.

Violence largely happens “offstage”, but the image this novel creates of a fraught and divided society makes it clear that fear was as much a burden in the “Troubles” as bloodshed.

Alas, after all my praise, and as I said at the opening of this review, we come to the last forty pages, and here I think Anna Burns stumbles. The novel ends with a tangle of hidden family- and community-relationships being revealed to us. It is a tying-up of loose ends, with hitherto-undisclosed relationships being explained, like the true situation of “maybe-boyfriend”. It is here that the comic image of the amorous milkman is deployed. I felt a little deflated by the patness of this, but not enough to make me underestimate the novel as a whole. One of the better Booker winners.