PJE's Booker Blog: Milkman delivers

Thursday, October 18, 2018

Milkman delivers

Would the Americans complete a hat-trick of Man Booker wins? That was the $64,000¹ question at London's Guildhall on Tuesday² night. And the answer was nay.

The £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2018 was awarded to Anna Burns for her third novel Milkman (Faber & Faber) - making her the first writer from Northern Ireland to win the prize in this, its 50th anniversary year.

I was very impressed. Milkman offers insight into a divided community, explaining and exposing its parochial absurdities and the intimidation that sustains the divide. The lack of character names seemed clunky and annoyingly repetitive at first, but it is a device that helps the novel transcend a specific time or place. Names would place the characters on one side of the divide or the other. So ignore lazy blurbs describing it as a book set in Belfast in the 1970s, people in other divided communities around the world will recognize echoes of their situations as well.

The narrator is a young woman who likes to walk around with her head in a book - ususally a 19th century novel. This draws attention to herself in a society where you do not draw attention to yourself. Whether by 'reading-while-walking', or by being seen talking to someone you shouldn't be seen talking to. A community riddled with dangerous rumours and menacing groupthink. Pressure to conform. To be 'one of us' not 'one of them'. To obey arbitrary, unwritten, almost Gormenghastian rules.

In an interview for the official Man Booker website, Anna Burns explains that she "grew up in a place that was rife with violence, distrust and paranoia, and peopled by individuals trying to navigate and survive in that world as best as they could." Milkman conveys that with great style. As reviewer Claire Allfree put it: "If Beckett had written a prose poem about the Troubles, it would read a lot like this."

This year's judges (Kwame Anthony Appiah, Val McDermid, Leo Robson and Jacqueline Rose and Leanne Shapton) read 171 books - an absurd number - that's almost more than one per day - and are to be congratulated for finding Milkman and bringing it to all our attention.

For premature speculation about possible contenders for the 2019 prize keep an eye on: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/126184.Man_Booker_Prize_Eligible_2019