But it also seems clear to me that these insistent strategies are in service of the book’s mood of total claustrophobia, and that they contribute to, rather than diminish, its overall effectiveness. The book’s long sentences, its penchant for the exhaustive, can at times be challenging, and there were stretches where I found its uncanny energies stagnated for too long. Among Burns’ singular strengths as a writer is her ability to address the topics of trauma and tyranny with a playfulness that somehow never diminishes the sense of her absolute seriousness. You might want to read up on it before picking it up.For all the simplicity of its setup, Milkman is a richly complex portrayal of a besieged community and its traumatized citizens, of lives lived within many concentric circles of oppression. Milkman is not a book for everyone because definitely it wasn’t for me.

Stream of consciousness is very much present in the story telling and I found I quite liked it.Īnna Burns fear and trauma through her characters and the consequences of living in a society where being unique or impressionable is a dangerous thing. From early on you realize there is no plot and you’re just cruising through. What I loved is the strangeness of the book. At some point I had to get the audio book to read along because the book kept on losing me. Our narrator talks in circles more often than not. The story drones on and on without breaks.

Milkman is a difficult, tedious read with really, really long paragraphs and chapters. The book opens up with a captivating opening line and for the first 50 pages I was hooked. Milkman is set in Northern Ireland, and is narrated by an unnamed character, Middle Sister, who takes us through a paranoid society. My oh my was I not disappointed! To be fair, the book has its good moments but its also tiring. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.Īfter eyeing Milkman for years, I was excited to finally own a copy and reading. Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes ‘interesting’. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. “…but youth and fitness don’t count for everything, often not even for anything.”

Milkman anna burns review