Not since New Zealander Keri Hulme got that call in 1985 for The Bone People has a Booker jury delivered a bigger bombshell. A consistent outsider in the bookies’ odds, Anna Burns’s Milkman is the sort of boldly experimental – and frankly brain-kneading – novel that is usually let in at longlist stage and gently dropped as the competition narrows. And for that reason alone it is a smartly provocative choice – one that has been waiting to be made as the publishing industry searches for the soul of its next generation.
It’s a next generation that has nothing to do with age (Burns is 56 and has two previous novels and a novella to her name). Rather it’s a choice for the Corbyn era, which recognises the worth of a formal contrarian and thumbs its nose at the wisdom of old-school pundits. It will no doubt baffle many readers and depress a good few booksellers as an opener for the festive sales season, but it’s refreshingly not a vote for the status quo at a time when many have been saying the Booker has lost its mojo since it opened up to the Americans.
There are many reasons why Milkman is an unlikely winner: Burns’s narrative is relentlessly internalised and she doesn’t have much truck with conventions such as paragraphing. But it has a strong and distinctive voice, and its literary seriousness is announced early on by the 18-year-old Northern Irish protagonist, as she describes her daily routine in an unnamed city during the Troubles: “Every weekday, rain or shine, gunplay or bombs, stand-off or riots, I preferred to walk home reading my latest book,” she tells us. “This would be a 19th-century book because I did not like 20th-century books because I did not like the 20th-century. I suppose now, looking back, this milkman knew all of that as well.”
What exactly is this “all” that the Milkman – a predatory paramilitary – knew? That she walked home alone, or that she was steeped in the 19th century? The latter, when you stop to think about it, is the creepier since it suggests he has made it his project to infiltrate not only her routine but her head.
Burns, the first Northern Irish writer to win the Booker, dispenses with the usual Troubles-fiction paraphernalia of kneecappings and state-sanctioned treachery, for a social dysfunction that is both gothic and comically Kafkaesque. As our heroine points out, having been raised in a hair-trigger society that believed “if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening ... how could you be under attack by something that wasn’t there?”
Milkman may not be the best novel in contention this year, but it is certainly a plucky and challenging one – also one that speaks directly to the #MeToo era and to political anxieties over hard borders in Ireland and around the more recently troubled world.
