12/25/2023 0 Comments Sometimes a great notion audiobookPassages of great beauty alternate with wads of glue. Describing a closed society requires dense, closed writing, and on the page, Milkman can be as impenetrable as Kevlar. In other words, Milkman is a dead-on portrait of the claustrophobia of an adolescent mind within the even more oppressive claustrophobia of a totalitarian state. These secrets in turn make everyone suspicious of any behaviour that doesn’t conform to local customs. No one in the book has a name, in fact, but is referred to as Somebody McSomebody or Tablets Girl or Maybe-Boyfriend or Eldest Sister, reflecting the paranoia of Belfast’s factionalized residents, who fear the consequences (death at the hands of roving paramilitary squads) of naming names and thus being branded informers. There are no comforting blocks of dialogue, only conversations remembered within the mental monologue of the girl narrator, who is unnamed. It does not conform to standard paragraph form. Milkman’s interior tunnel is long and narrow. Demanding literary novels told from a single interior point of view are all the rage these days (thank you, Rachel Cusk). The worst thing about Milkman, Anna Burns’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel, is that it’s a superbly detailed moment-by-moment chronicle of an 18-year-old’s inner thoughts that is 352 pages long. The best thing about Milkman, Anna Burns’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel, is that it’s a superbly detailed moment-by-moment chronicle of an 18-year-old’s inner thoughts as she navigates the treacherous complications of life in Belfast during the deadly Troubles of the late 1970s.
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