Milkman

"Winner"

"Anna Burns is a Northern Irish writer, and her third novel, Milkman , won the Booker in 2018. When it came out, I tried reading it, and although I was intrigued by the voice, it didn’t quite capture me. Then, earlier this year, I read Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe , which is a masterful history of Northern Ireland from the 1970s through today. It provides an excellent and very specific way into a topic that I think feels really expansive to a lot of people. It starts with the story of one woman’s disappearance from a housing block in 1972. It’s wonderful. After reading that, I felt the need to go straight back to Milkman. Its style and voice are striking because everything is written literally and namelessly. The protagonist is called ‘middle sister;’ she has a ‘maybe-boyfriend.’ They refer to ‘the country over the water,’ which is England, and ‘over the border,’ which is the Republic of Ireland. Everything is written that way, and it has a really powerful defamiliarizing effect, even though it’s a very accurate representation of a time and place in our real, lived global history. It’s set in Belfast in the ’70s, though the city is never named. If you were to say, ‘Here’s a novel about life in Belfast during the Troubles,’ I don’t know that a mass audience would go for that. It might strike people as a whole can of worms that they aren’t qualified to observe through a critical lens, even if it’s art – a novel – that we’re talking about. It sounds unapproachable if you know nothing about the topic. But something magic happens when you remove the specificity of names, and instead you describe every character and every bit of this city as though it’s a science fiction novel. Saying something like, Third Brother-In-Law was injured when a member of the Loyalist paramilitary set up a blockade in the District Below The Religious Center makes the story feel surreal, and, ultimately I think that allows a reader to feel more emotionally free; you can have your emotional response to the story without the fear that you’re misunderstanding something. At some point right after reading it, I came across a text about how the British urban planners who redesigned Belfast in the middle of the 20th century were creating this metropolis of dead ends and claustrophobia, and trying to contain a whole population, as if this was a city that was also a prison. You have culs-de-sac that lead to nothing. You have roads where there shouldn’t be roads—they are there to get you lost. Milkman illustrates that very poetically. I had been thinking about architecture, because I had just written a novel set in a theme park, where so much thought has been put into the architectural experience of whimsy, having choices about where you go, never feeling frightened, and being a good consumer and all that. This is a book that I started writing in lockdown, when I got really obsessed with videos of animatronics malfunctioning, and rides which no longer exist and have been largely forgotten. These are videos put together by extraordinary researchers; these people are really obsessed with theme parks, often Disney parks, and they’re able to present the history and development of these rides in such granular detail. I’m not actually a massive theme park person. I’m from California and I went to Disneyland growing up, but it’s not part of my adult personality. When I became obsessed with these videos, I couldn’t really figure out why. I felt very drained during 2020, like we all did. I didn’t have a lot of creative inspiration in any area or topic that felt inherently literary, and I thought, rather than reaching for something highbrow, what if I just wrote about the thing I’m obsessed with at the moment? Because I could talk about it for hours: those videos, those animatronics and those rides. Whenever I found myself talking to people, in the back of my mind, I wanted to tell them about this weird dark ride from 1995 that got shut down immediately because it was so breathtakingly un-fun. And then I thought: What if I just put that into a novel? Over time, this story emerged. A young woman who’s worked at a park that she adores, alongside her seemingly perfect boyfriend, finds herself tasked with shutting the park down after a grisly death took place. And as she does this, grieving the loss of this whimsical land that she called home, she starts to notice people who shouldn’t be there, and strange things happening underneath her feet. My editor and my agent encouraged me to lean into genre fiction with this, to let things get weird, and not feel too much pressure to make it a perfectly polished thing. Having that permission was wonderful. It’s an ode to what theme parks and any kind of hyper-curated space can do to a person, because I love what they do to a person. Curation gets bad PR. I love psychological manipulation at an architectural level. I love feeling immersed and magical. As adults, we are not given the opportunity to do that enough: be immersed . With that said, the book isn’t entirely about joyful immersion. I shouldn’t make it seem like a particularly happy novel; it’s not. It’s a really odd duck."

"These novels aren’t exactly ‘about’ anything; that is to say, there are many subjects they’re about, not just one. Each evokes a world which prompts the reader to think about many things. That said, I think this is clearly a novel in some sense about divided societies. It’s a novel about how in any divided society, men can abuse their positions to take advantage of women. I think it’s also a novel about the terrifying power of gossip, and the way in which the circulation of stories about people—true or false—can shape their own options. “ Milkman is a novel about the terrifying power of gossip” Though it’s obvious that it grows out of Burns’ own society, Northern Ireland and the conflicts there, I felt very much that it was the sort of novel that would help you to think about any divided society. I suspect that people who lived in Lebanon or Syria or Sri Lanka would see echoes. It’s that mixture of the particular and the universal that is there in a lot of great writing. Yes. Obviously, it’s about things that #MeToo is addressing. But it’s very writerly in the sense that it evokes a world without really banging you over the head with what you’re supposed to think about anything. The world itself—the world that she’s created—is the interesting thing. The young woman at the heart of the novel is a surprising person in many ways. She reads a lot in a society that doesn’t seem very interested in literature. She’s learning French, for no obvious reason except that she wants to learn French. She has a young man she’s actually interested in, and then she’s chased by this other man who she’s not interested in. She’s quite smart: she realizes what she can and can’t do. She’s very conscious of the ways in which the circulation of gossip means that everything she does will be interpreted in a certain way—the wrong way, usually. When we announced the winner to the press at the dinner, a journalist said it was very challenging, and I said something about how it was challenging in the sort of way that a stroll up Snowdon is challenging. It’s challenging because it’s a little uphill, but it’s worth it for the view, you know. It wasn’t my choice to describe it as challenging—it was the journalist’s choice to ask me about that. I wouldn’t have used that term. We read it three times. We read it to put it on the longlist; we read it between the longlist and the shortlist; and then we read it again. It’s a novel for the ear as well as for the mind—I found myself reading it out loud to myself sometimes. She’s talking to us, in a very plausible (though peculiar) voice. I imagine the audiobook is going to do well, purely because her voice is so compelling. If you have any difficulty figuring out what a sentence is about, all you have to do is read it out loud and it’s perfectly clear. “You couldn’t mistake this novel for any other” Just as all interesting writing is unlike anything else, you couldn’t mistake this novel for any other. It’s not very much like anything else I’ve read; it’s very particular. But once you get into it, it just goes along. Partly because you want to know what’s going to happen. Obviously, I read it more than once, and interestingly I still found myself being pulled along. Even though I knew what was going to happen, I wanted to remember exactly how things happened."

""Milkman," by Anna Burns, an intelligent and thoroughly engrossing novel about a girl who's forced into a relationship with a powerful man."

"I recently heard the audio version of "Milkman," by Anna Burns. I found myself moved by the rhythm and repetition of the phrases and sentences."