“Milkman” by Anna Burns

This novel is set in northern Ireland during the Troubles. The presence of violence is ever-lurking in the air. It is narrated by an eighteen year-old girl, living in renouncer-controlled territory, who is a bit of an outsider in her tight-knit community. While in the past her eccentric behavior had kept her out of neighborhood scrutiny, her world comes crashing down when she gains the wrong man’s attention. “Every weekday, rain or shine, gunplay or bombs, stand-off or riots, I preferred to walk home reading my latest book. This would be a nineteenth-century book because I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century. I suppose now, looking back, this milkman knew all of that as well.”

The unnamed mob plays as much of a role in the novel as any character. The neighborhood always had eyes on everyone. Everyone had to be careful what they revealed in public. Preference falsification was the communal norm. “Everybody read minds—had to, otherwise things got complicated. Just as most people here chose not to say what they meant in order to protect themselves, they could also, at certain moments when they knew their mind was being read, learn to present their topmost mental level to those who were reading it whilst in the undergrowth of their consciousness, inform themselves privately of what their true thinking was about.”

Life in the neighborhood was consumed by the violence. And the violence was caused by the occupation and the border. “You couldn’t just die here, couldn’t have an ordinary death here, not anymore, not of natural causes, not by accident such as falling out a window, especially not after all the other violent deaths taking place in this district now. It had to be political, he said. Had to be about the border, meaning comprehensible.” The community had its own language, its own norms, and its own justice. “‘Mark our words,’ said people, and again this all made sense within the context of out intricately coiled, overly secretive, hyper-gossipy, puritanical yet indecent, totalitarian district.” The narrator is as much trapped by the encroachment of the judgmental mob, as by her actual pursuer. “I was being sick because of Milkman stalking me, Milkman tracking me, Milkman knowing everything about me, biding his time, closing in on me, and because of the perniciousness of the secrecy, gawking and gossip that existed in this place.” In a place where gossip often got spun into truth, one would often have to lie to the entire world for fear of just who was listening in. “In a district that thrived on suspicion, supposition and imprecision, where everything was so back-to-front it was impossible to tell a story properly, or not tell it but just remain quiet, nothing could get said here or not said but it was turned into gospel.”