Burns doesn’t come near that length, but her sentences have a vocal quality that snaps in the wind. I studied that (in translation) over and over again. I have had a fascination with long sentences for a couple of decades-something I never really incorporate into my own work-but it reached an apex ten years ago or so when Bola–o dropped that 5-page sentence in the first book of his 2666.

For such a rich prose style, there is something arid about it. But Milkman has that kind of claustrophobia to it, and it has that kind of world-building, as if the bricks and mortar are going up behind you, in the shadows, as the action keeps you uncomfortably focused on the things in front. I noticed one reviewer on Amazon disparagingly wrote about it as a Dystopia and I’m not sure they had entirely grasped it’s not a sci-fi novel. Burns doesn’t seem interested in explaining any of this world to you, she is in the thick of it, in the mud of the human experience from the start, and there are no reference points.

It’s a book about the Troubles in Northern Island, yes, but it seems to be doing something with it that is, okay, crucially Joycean, but is also flexing outside of that.

So what am I thinking of Milkman as I take a slow stroll through it? I am finding it exhilarating, and I’m reading it slowly because I want to get into every nook and cranny of its craft. I enjoy that we live in times where things like classism can be openly addressed in the arts-that they are debated and not just the rasion d’etre of a few grizzled artists fighting the good fight. So there’s that going on-the pricking of the bubble of the London literati-and I enjoy seeing that. What is a difficult book, after all? And shouldn’t it be difficult books, the ones that push boundaries and ask us to question literature as a medium, that win these prizes? Shouldn’t it be books, and writers, who seek to open us up as readers that get the plaudits? Shouldn’t it be books that remind us (or teach us) that the beauty of writing is not the art of joining works together until they make pretty sentences? I liked that I read somewhere, in response to a London critic who said the book was “difficult”, that an Irish critic just said it was “Irish”. I came to it now for a number of reasons, some of them counter-intuitive.įirstly, I was lured in by the classist controversy surrounding its win. So getting to Anna Burns’ Milkman within a year of winning the Man Booker Prize is no small thing for me. I’ve often read books in ignorance of their prize-pedigree decades after they’ve hit the headlines, thinking, how on earth did this book not win anything, only to find out it did. I‘m always quite late to the big award winners.

The milkman book review