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Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2018 *sigh*
This isn't a bad book, but I didn't enjoy reading it at all - which confronts me with the challenge to do the novel justice while also explaining why it didn't appeal to me. Challenge accepted!

"Milkman" tells the story of an 18-year-old woman in Belfast during the Troubles. While she is trying to stay out of the turmoil around her, even going as far as reading while she is walking the city, this attempt is obviously doomed: In times of a crisis of this magnitude, everything becomes political, and everyone is drawn into the conflict in his or her own way. Burns main aim is to show how the charged situation disrupts communities, not only between the two opposing sides, but also within the narrator's party: Who might be a traitor? Who is not properly supporting the cause? Who doesn't conform to the group's standards? Who might be a spy? Fear and fanatism drive the people into a frenzy, a kind of communal neurosis, fueled by the constant state of emergency they live in.

What I liked about the book is that Burns manages to write about a specific historic situation, but to transcend her story way beyond that: She does a great job detailing the psychological effects of fear and trauma, and these effects of the Troubles can be transferred to many conflicts and politically charged situations - as I am German, many passages reminded me of stories I heard and books I read about the GDR, where people also lived in constant fear of being spied upon, of being ostracized and ruined because they were declared to be traitors to the socialist cause, no matter what they really did or did not believe.

Our narrator is in a comparable situation, as she is accused of having an affair with the married "Milkman", which is not the case - still, people in the community create a reality by perpetuating the story. Large parts - in fact, very large parts - of the book are comprised of the protagonist's ruminations, and while many of her thoughts are interesting per se, she goes on and on and on and accesses certain aspects from all angles possible, again and again. From a poetic standpoint, this makes sense: There is not much real action, but much talk that goes around in circles and thus becomes the reality of the book and of the protagonist's life. But I found it tedious to read, and in parts I got seriously annoyed because I felt like I had long gotten the point, but Burns was still hammering it home for the sake of going all the way through with her poetic concept - very consequential, but for my taste, also very garrulous in parts.

Talking about ideas that are repeated ad infintum: Another important topic in the book are names and labels, because, as I explained above, the expressions that are attached to a person tend to become and utterly define the person (or the other way around) in the context of the conflict. Thus, there is "Milkman" (a senior paramilitary figure who stalks and threatens our protagonist), "the real Milkman" (surprise: He really is a milkman), "maybe-boyfriend", the "longest friend from primary school", the "land-over-the-water" and "the land-over-the-border", and so on and so forth - after the 3,000th mention of "maybe-boyfriend", I thought the idea to constantly repeat these labels became "maybe-pretentious". It's not that I don't see what Burns is doing here, but repeating an idea over 400 pages turns clever into annoying, IMHO.

It needs to be said that while this is a serious book about serious stuff, it is also in parts very funny, as Burns underlines the absurdity of the whole situation, and as the story progresses, it becomes more and more bizarre (which I didn't mind). I also found the way Burns explores the role of women and marriage way more interesting as in, let's say, its fellow Booker nominee The Water Cure.

Still, to finish this was a chore - I saw the intellectual and literary merit of the book, but I can't say that I had fun reading it.