Book Review: "Milkman" by Anna Burns

Used books are all the rage, especially when they have other people's notes in them. I have to admit though that they could smell better - this one perhaps didn't smell great and it got weird when I was reading it. A few years' ago, this book was pretty much in my face from the whole Man Booker Prize stuff, but along the way I lost it. I think it was because the book simply didn't interest me, but looking back I believe that I was pretty against the wave of what was being nominated for the awards. Needless the say, the book is pretty good but it doesn't really leave you with a change. It has no real impact on the reader though it is interesting. I believe that this may be because of how it is written.

A man known as 'Milkman' takes an interest in a young girl, romantically. She is driven around, taken out and narrates the experience as being strange and disconnected. I'm not going to lie, with the backdrop of the Troubles, this book seemed to have a lot of nothing going on - I would've liked more stuff about the political atmosphere. I found myself genuinely not caring about the girl's worries most of the time because they were so detached from the atmosphere of the time. As the rumours spread, she becomes more and more distrusting of the people around her and we realise how fast perhaps misinformation spreads to breed toxicity - which there is often enough of during times of strife in which two sides both think they are right and the other is wrong.

The 'Milkman' makes threats as the isolation of the girl becomes more prominent. Again, this is pretty much textbook behaviour for this kind of man and so, it surprises nobody. The saving grace of this book was the way in which the political atmosphere makes the book feel almost claustrophobic at times - the assertiveness of the narrative voice though, is very jarring. From the beginning of the novel we are taken aback by this and honestly, I didn't like it as much as I thought I would. Again, the book can be interesting but the writing definitely lets it down from time to time.

We then have the dynamics of the girl and her boyfriend. I'm not going to lie, the boyfriend could have been left out of the story altogether and it wouldn't have made a single bit of difference. Most of his scenes are filler, and most of them are badly written. It's fluff to make the book longer. The question we throw out there is this: by the time we get to the suspense of the phone call between them, our 'girl' is already a pariah, she's outcast completely and so, how is she therefore stable enough to still have her boyfriend? She is not. Everything with the boyfriend is filler - the 'Milkman' at one point threatens to kill him and it goes pretty much nowhere. There's a phone call which I have heard is one of the most intense and heartbreaking scenes in the book and made me feel basically nothing.

The book's ending is more cinematic that suited to a book covering the time. Also, it is entirely unrealistic. The bathroom scene is laughable. I'm not going to lie but as this book progressed it slowly got worse and worse until it hit the ending. I'm not sure that the very end can happen after all of this. The involvement of the 'Milkman' in the resignation of the girl's assumed fate was perhaps the smartest part and that's not saying a lot. was severely disappointed as I'm not sure the author really displayed the realism that is being claimed clearly in the book.

All in all, there were definitely some positives about this book, but none of them came from the writing. The earlier on in the book we are, the more promise there is for the story - the author rushes an unrealistic ending mashed like an overcooked jacket potato into the proposed realism of the rest of the book. Honestly, it was annoying but I'm still going to recommend it. Perhaps you can find a home in it - perhaps I'm the problem.