But middle sister in fact speaks with a mostly unmarked style, instead meandering along thought-journeys that loop and loop as she processes her surroundings, slowly taking us towards sensitive readings of what it means to survive under political extremes. At first it seems as if we might be in Irvine Welsh territory, reading a voice that is coming to us from deep inside a place and a time, cloaked in dialect. With that banging first sentence, Burns disorients us with strange prose. It’s impossible to know whom to trust, in this novel, since all communication blows along the currents of gossip, suspicion, and fear. The plot is confusing, and middle sister’s language more confusing still, which serve to illustrate the circuitous truth of Burns’s book. The problems here are not actually political: “maybe-boyfriend was to be killed under the catch-all of the political problems even if, in reality, the milkman was going to kill him out of disguised sexual jealousy over me.” Maybe-boyfriend loves middle sister, and the flag is an excuse for milkman to get nasty with him. He keeps implying that he is going to carbomb her “maybe-boyfriend.” This maybe-boyfriend recently bought a car that had the wrong flag on it. But she still has to reckon with the violence he brings into her life. Middle sister doesn’t care that milkman is a “renouncer” per se. a paramilitary republican in the IRA model) starts speaking to her, uninvited. The narrator herself is “middle sister.” She is already suspected of oddness for her habit of reading while walking, but things really go wrong for her when a “renouncer” (i.e. She lives in a paramilitary stronghold where people do not have names, instead referred to as “wee sisters,” “Ma,” “tablets girl,” or similar. Narrated in the first person, Milkman is the mordant tale of a teenage girl in a time and place that is implicitly Northern Ireland and explicitly the late 1970s (the movie Alien has just come out). Thus opens the 2018 winner of the Man Booker Prize, Milkman, by Anna Burns. It’s a banger the way that a club hit bangs, driven by the thud, thud, thud of consonants.

“The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.” It bangs loudly like a firework into the silence-no crescendo. The only word for this opening sentence is banging.

Anna burns books