Milkman, by Anna Burns

I first heard of Milkman from my mother, who must have read it when it was pretty new. I remember her trying to explain it to me and it was a little hard to wrap my head around her description, but having now read it, I understand why. The description went something like, "It's about the troubles in Northern Ireland, and you don't know any of the characters' names, and there's a mysterious guy called 'Milkman' who everyone thinks is involved with the main character, but really she doesn't know him," which is completely accurate, but didn't give me much of a sense of the book. Though, my mother also said she thought I would like it, and she's usually good at knowing my taste in books, so it stuck with me in the back of my mind. Earlier this summer someone suggested we read it for our book club and I remembered my mom's recommendation, so I seconded the suggestion and eventually we selected it. 

I originally thought I was going to have to read it on my iPad -- I was able to get the ebook from the library -- but when I was in Ithaca a couple weeks ago browsing at bookshops (something that seemed so novel after all these months!), I saw a copy at The Odyssey Bookstore when I hadn't even thought to be looking for it, but I bought it on the spot and I'm so glad I did. I don't think I would have liked to read this as an ebook. The paragraphs are dense and long and I think that would have felt compounded on the screen. It took me two weeks to the day to finish Milkman, which somehow felt like an eternity. I had originally budgeted myself a week to read it ahead of our book club meeting, but thankfully others also found it slow going so we pushed it back a week and I finished in time. I don't know if it's that I've gotten used to finishing books in just a few days or if it's somehow compounded by being at home nearly all the time, but I don't think two weeks used to feel like a long time to be reading one book. There may have been a day or two where I didn't read it at all and there were definitely days where I only read 10-15 pages, but my pace did pick up for the last 100 pages or so. All this talk of how slow it felt is not to say I didn't enjoy it; quite the opposite. The narrator's voice is unique. I felt I could hear her and get inside her head. There was also something really beautiful that came through here and there: her latter years care for her young self. She was 18 years old, the middle of 10 or 11 children, living in the midst of this political and social situation that made her life and her options very narrow. You have the sense that she emerged from it into a wider world, and that the narrator is telling her young self: it's ok; you did ok; you could not have done differently.

One small reason I was interested in reading Milkman is that I had yet to read a book from Northern Ireland for my World Books Project -- I've read books from the Republic of Ireland and from the other 3 countries of the United Kingdom, so Northern Ireland seemed like a particular gap I needed to fill. And Milkman is very much about Northern Ireland. The political situation of Catholics in the North is not so much the backdrop for the events of the book as the milieu. Reading this book was pretty eye-opening for me. On the one hand, I did know things had been bad, but I guess I never quite internalized how bad. I visited Northern Ireland with my parents twice before the border opened; we had family friends in Belfast. The first time was in 1987 and we went by ferry I believe from Scotland, and I can't say I remember much about that crossing or visit. The second time was around Easter in 1989 or 1990 and we drove up from the Republic of Ireland and I will never forget that crossing. I was stretched out in the back seat of the car. As we stopped at the border, two soldiers were positioned on either side of our car, each pointing a gun at one of the four car windows. As we got to Belfast, there were bonfires burning all over. My mother tells me people were burning the pope in effigy. The city center was closed to traffic and there were checkpoints everywhere. It made a big impression, and yet somehow, perhaps because I was 13 and didn't comprehend the significance of what I saw (I had never had a gun pointed at me at a border crossing before, but then again neither had I crossed many borders), perhaps because I was just there a few days, I really didn't understand the scope of the Troubles. Milkman drove it home: the divided communities; the isolation; the mistrust; the dead or fled members of every family.