The imagination getting hold of the moral compass and setting it aspin. Milkman reads like one of those Russian novels that begins “In those days, in our Province, in the town of Z-” and in its intricate domestic study of a disparate family there are agreeable echoes of Chekov, Tolstoy and Turgenev.There's a shift in fiction coming out of the North. These people could be any people in any tight-knit community.

The game Burns is playing here is psychological and sociological not historical. Better to fly under the radar than attract the attention of the paramilitary chieftains or the police. Middle sister becomes 'interesting' for the first time in her life – something she had never aspired to be. He's a dangerous man and when he encounters her jogging in the park and starts running along side her they are noticed together and tongues begin to wag in the small gossipy world of their street. Milkman is a creepy 41-year-old married man who has a reputation as a groomer of young girls and as a player in the paramilitaries. He offers her a lift in his sinister, white 'shapeshifting' van which she declines. The book begins with the appearance of the mysterious Milkman in her life as she is walking home from work reading Ivanhoe. Our narrator-protagonist, known only known as 'middle sister', has just turned 18 and is kept busy working in the city, jogging with 'third brother-in-law' and concealing her relationship with 'maybe-boyfriend'. And Burns's agenda is not to unpack the dreary tribal squabbles that so characterised Troubles-era Northern Ireland rather she is working in an altogether more interesting milieu, seeking answers to the big questions about identity, love, enlightenment and the meaning of life for a young woman on the verge of adulthood. Milkman is a novel set in the Belfast of the uneasy 1970s but the city, like the lead protagonist, is never named. It can only mean enlightenment.”īurns is the teacher and we are the students. “Your unease, even your temporary unhingement in the face of this sunset is encouraging. The amazed, bewildered, unsettled class discovers that the sky is pink, lemon, mauve and orange-red. She takes them to the window overlooking the city and demands that they look at the sky, really look at it, and tell her what they see.

“Why all the fancy footwork when all he need say is that the sky is blue?” someone cries and a chant begins: “Le ciel est blue! Le ciel est blue!” until the teacher’s calm unnerves everyone and the chanting stops. The author had been describing the sky in French with a bevy of trying metaphors and finally the class mutinies. There’s a moment about a third of the way through Anna Burns’s Milkman when the un-named narrator is in an adult education French class who rebel against the difficult novel their teacher has assigned as homework.

Milkman by anna burns