Book Review: Anna Burns gives us a unique voice in her nameless narrator

The winner of the Booker Prize in 2018 is a story that intrigues and challenges in equal measure, using language in a unique way to convey a claustrophobic, paranoid and dark sectarian world. The narrator is a young woman recalling her coming of age in a paramilitary enclave of a nameless place where everyone is trying to stay alive by not being noticed.

The Joycean language is masterful, giving the nameless narrator and her community a dialect all its own, one that creates a vivid and dystopian milieu. This is a book in which nobody has names. Instead, they have nicknames that reduce them to a singular characteristic, including 'maybe-boyfriend', with whom our narrator is in a nascent relationship, or 'third brother-in-law' (married to 'third sister').

Then, of course, is the eponymous Milkman, who is a notorious paramilitary figure, so called for delivering bombs in milk crates. The Milkman targets our narrator (who gets noticed by reading while walking), which generates the rumour of an affair that the narrator cannot quash. Unable to shake off Milkman, she is made a pariah in her small community, but the experience leads to her political awakening.

Anna Burns gives us a unique voice in her nameless narrator. But Milkman is a pretty tough read overall, even for fans of literary fiction. The difficulty is less about the unusual language and more about the narrative mode: the narrator does a lot of explaining, and the past tense robs the story of a lot of tension. Nevertheless, Milkman is a fresh and thought-provoking take on the inhumanity of sectarianism and a cautionary tale for everyone about the dangers of ideology and nationalism that remain an ever-present danger in our world.