Anna Burns, 2018
the fifty-sixth book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Kevin Hunt
This recent Booker Prize winner is an odd one. It’s very clearly set in Northern Ireland during “the Troubles”, but it goes out of its way not to say so. The word “Ireland” never appears in the book. The word “Britain” never appears in the book. The words “Catholic” and “Protestant” never appear in the book. There are the “right religion” and the “wrong religion”, and there are the people “over the road” and the country “over the water”, but no proper nouns are employed for any of them. Even characters don’t get named: our eighteen-year-old narrator is generally called “middle sister”, except by her mother, to whom she is “middle daughter”; the guy she’s seeing is “maybe-boyfriend”; her confidante from her school days is “longest friend”; some local denizens are “tablets girl” and “nuclear boy”; the one character of any note who does get a name of sorts is referred to as “Somebody McSomebody”. The result is almost the opposite of an allegory. This is not “I say I’m telling the story of ‘Animal Farm’, but really I’m talking about the Soviet Union!” or “I say I’m telling the story of ‘Aslan’, but really I’m talking about Jesus!”. This is “Yes, this is set in Northern Ireland, but I’m not going to dwell on specifics, because they don’t really matter. This story isn’t about Northern Ireland—it’s about places that in one way or another are like Northern Ireland, of which there are many.”
This may seem like an odd claim, as most readers of this novel probably do not regularly attend funerals for friends and family members who have been killed in low-level factional warfare—not unless they’re involved with organized crime. But the distinguishing feature of the culture in which our narrator finds herself stuck—whether as a result of the terrorism, or as a cause of it, or both—is its insistence on a particularly closed-minded and miserable conformity. One memorable example early on comes when the narrator is taking an evening French class and her classmates start griping about how one of the passages the teacher has assigned is going on and on about the sky, when there is nothing to say about the sky other than that it’s blue. The teacher takes the students to a window to look at the sunset and describe the colors they see. Our narrator finds it “a mix of pink and lemon with a glow of mauve behind it”, with “an emerging gold above the mauve” that is “moving towards a slip of silver”. But her classmates turn their backs to the window, a move “instinctive and protective”, and shout, “Blue!” “Blue!” “The sky is blue!” This may be darkly amusing, but toward the end of the book, the narrator talks about a more serious aspect of the dismal culture in which she finds herself ensnared: the pressure from the community not just to marry young, but to marry the wrong person, because by marrying someone you genuinely loved, “you might cause envy and anger to arise in others”, which in her neck of the woods could not be borne. “Then there was fear of oneself, of one’s independence, of one’s potential, so avoid that path by marrying somebody not on it,” she continues, “somebody who wouldn’t recognise it or encourage it in you”. And then—you know, I just want to quote this whole thing at you:
Of course there was the big one, the biggest reason for not marrying the right spouse. If you married that one, the one you loved and desired and who loved and desired you back, with the union proving true and good and replete with the most fulfilling happiness, well, what if this wonderful spouse didn’t fall out of love with you, or you with them, and neither of you either, got killed in the political problems? All those joyful evers and infinites? Are you sure, really, really sure, you could cope with the prospect of that? The community decided that no, it couldn’t. Great and sustained happiness was far too much to ask of it. That was why marrying in doubt, marrying in guilt, marrying in regret, in fear, in despair, in blame, also in terrible self-sacrifice was pretty much the unspoken matrimonial requisite here.
So when the titular milkman, who is not actually a milkman but rather an IRA paramilitary (or, in the language of the novel, a “renouncer of the state”), begins stalking the narrator, constantly popping up wherever she happens to go and acting as though they’re in a relationship, the community response is not helpful. For the locals, rumor is fact, at least so long as it’s unflattering rumor, and for the narrator to take up with a terrorist who is both already married and more than twice her age is unflattering enough for them to run with. So despite her protestations that she wants nothing to do with the milkman and has turned her life upside down to avoid him, it is collectively decided that she is his mistress—“the upstart, the little Frenchwoman, the arriviste, the hussy”—setting up a battle of wills: how long can even a strong-minded teenager hang on to her sense of reality when everyone she knows insists on a very different one? (The sky is blue!) This is the central conflict of the book—not protagonist vs. antagonist, but protagonist vs. society. Let me put it this way. Many years ago I coded up a little PHP toy called 23,040 Bridges, based on a passage from The Pigman by Paul Zindel. That passage went like this:
There is a river with a bridge over it and a wife and her husband live in a house on one side. The wife has a lover who lives on the other side of the river, and the only way to get from one side of the river to the other is to walk across the bridge or to ask the boatman to take you. One day the husband tells his wife that he has to be gone all night to handle some business in a faraway town. The wife pleads with him to take her with him because she knows if he doesn’t she will be unfaithful to him. The husband absolutely refuses to take her because she will only be in the way of his important business. So the husband goes alone. When he is gone, the wife goes over the bridge and stays with her lover. The night passes, and the sun is almost up when the wife leaves because she must get back to her own house before her husband gets home. She starts to cross the bridge, but she sees an assassin waiting for her on the other side, and she knows if she tries to cross, he will murder her. In terror, she runs up the side of the river and asks the boatman to take her across, but he wants fifty cents. She has no money, so he refuses to take her. The wife runs back to the lover’s house, and explains to him what her predicament is. She asks him for fifty cents to pay the boatman. The lover refuses, telling her it’s her own fault for getting into the situation. As dawn comes up, the wife is nearly out of her mind and decides to dash across the bridge. When she comes face to face with the assassin, he takes out a large knife and stabs her until she is dead. Now I want you to write down the names of the characters in the order in which you think they were most responsible for the wife’s death.
The milkman is like the Pigman’s assassin. The assassin is most directly responsible for the wife’s death, but at the same time, he seems more like a force of nature than a person. So while he may be monstrous, at least he’s not frustrating—you already know you’re not going to reason with him. The frustrating ones in the Pigman’s story are the ones who aren’t as cartoonishly evil as the assassin, but end up abetting him because they’re obstinate and refuse to listen. Similarly, the milkman is most directly responsible for the narrator’s woes, but it is soon clear that he too is an implacable force: you can’t reason with him, but can only eliminate him (and we learn in the first sentence of the novel that indeed that is the fate awaiting him). Again—vile, monstrous, but not frustrating. The frustrating characters are basically everyone else in the narrator’s town. Even the most sympathetic of them can’t process what the narrator is complaining about—their vision is too narrow to grasp it. They understand beating and rape, but the milkman’s tactics—“stalking without touch, tracking without touch, hemming-in, taking over, controlling a person with no flesh on flesh, no bone on bone ensuing”—are beyond them. Those who are less sympathetic shrug that whatever is going on between her and the milkman is the least of the narrator’s concerns: her real problem is that she has put herself “beyond the pale” with her “creepy”, “perverse”, “disturbing”, “deviant” habit of… reading while walking from place to place. (Of “reading books, whole books”, her exasperated friend scolds her.) And when the milkman treats his eventual conquest of the narrator as a fait accompli, everyone else in town, right up to her own mother, just goes along with it. In this respect, one of the places like Anna Burns’s Northern Ireland is the Internet, which is why I no longer really partake in online discussions. As annoying as it is to see a troll twist your words in a reply to a post, what’s infuriating is to watch the troll’s tactics work on a legion of dupes.
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