It’s one where, though she represents them in a highly imaginative manner, these atrocities did occur.

The world of Anna Burns’ Milkman is an all too real place. We’re not talking here about a fictionalised nightmarish dystopian society where every vestige of normality has broken down. Where almost every family you know has seen brothers, sons, sisters, fathers killed. Where masked paramilitary “heroes” dole out summary justice to suspected informers. Where people with cameras lurk in bushes to capture your every action.

This is an unforgettable novel.Imagine a world where it’s dangerous to be different. Milkman, however, is in essence stalking her, and over the course of several months she strives, under increasing pressure, to evade his surveilling gaze and sustained 'unstoppable predations.' There is a touch of James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus in the narrator's cerebral reticence, employing as she does silence, exile, and cunning in her attempt to fly the nets of her 'intricately coiled, overly secretive, hyper-gossippy, puritanical yet indecent, totalitarian district.' Enduring the exhausting 'minutiae of invasion' to which she is subjected by milkman, and the incursion of the Troubles on every aspect of life, the narrator of this claustrophobic yet strangely buoyant tale undergoes an unsentimental education in sexual politics.

From this initial approach, casual but menacing, the community, already suspicious of her for her 'beyond-the-pale' habit of walking and reading 19th-century literature, assumes that she is involved with the rebel. One day, 'milkman,' a 'highranking, prestigious dissident' who has nothing to do with the milk trade, offers the narrator a ride. The community is wedged between the renouncers, meting out rough justice for any suspected disloyalty, and the state's security forces. Her town is effectively governed by paramilitary renouncers of the state 'over the water,' as they call it. The narrator she and most of the characters are unnamed ('maybe-boyfriend,' 'third brother-in-law,' 'Somebody McSomebody') lives in an unspecified town in Northern Ireland during the Troubles of the 1970s. In her Booker-winning novel, Burns (No Bones) gives an acute, chilling, and often wry portrait of a young woman and a district under siege.

Milkman book review