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The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died. He had been shot by one of the state hit squads and I did not care about the shooting of this man.

And so it begins �� one of the most extraordinary novels I’ve ever read. I got what I call “the giddiness�� early on, but gave myself a talking down to not get ahead of myself, because really, can anyone sustain such a high level of interestingness for three hundred plus pages?

Written in the first person, through the eyes of an eighteen-year-old, who refers to herself as the middle sister, Milkman is very original. The setting is an unnamed place, somewhere in Northern Ireland during the 1970's Troubles.

The characters in this novel don’t have names, in the traditional way, but they are easily recognisable, I never got confused.
Speaking of characters, they're interesting, diverse and unusual. There’s Milkman who’s not really a milk man, he’s married, forty and he’s taken to stalking our protagonist. There’s also the real milkman who delivers milk and is also a friend of the family. There’s a maybe-boyfriend because they’re having a maybe-relationship. There’s ma who’s pious, hardened by life and who doesn’t trust our protagonist; pa, who had suffered from mental health issues, is dead now. The wee sisters are eight, nine and ten, they’re extremely intelligent and always together. There’s Somebody McSomebody who stalks her and can’t accept that she’s not interested. There’s the third brother in law, a man who’s in awe of women and who’s a compulsive runner, just like our protagonist. There’s even an issues women group aka the feminists. There’s the renouncers or those who take the republican side; there’s also a more vague category the beyond-the-pales those who society have deemed too different.
Our protagonist is apolitical, so much so, she takes refuge in reading mostly nineteen century literature. She’s trying her best to go unnoticed. She’s not pro or against anything. She doesn’t like to gossip, but that doesn’t stop others gossiping about her. People are put off by her walking and reading. Also, they think she’s the Milkman’s mistress. The absurdity of it all compels her to keep quiet, why have to explain herself and deny something that’s untrue? When she finally denies it, nobody believes her, not even her ma. Life becomes hell for the middle sister, as she joins the ranks of the beyond the pale.

Milkman is a dense novel, with some of the longest paragraphs I’ve ever read (with perfect punctuation, kudos to Ms Burns and/or editors). It’s both very readable and hard work. This was the closest I’ve ever come to completing/staying with a mindfulness exercise (in case you can’t tell from my all-over-the-place, unedited reviews, I have a very ADD brain). I didn’t mind taking my time with this novel, as I wanted to savour every line, turn of phrase, tangent and thought bubble. The writing is exquisite, playful, smart, insightful and all together bonkers, in a good way. The times were bonkers. The constant surveillance, suspicion, the imminence of death, affect everything and everyone. Everything is seen as a political statement. What you do and don’t do is labelled. There’s no escaping. The sense of self is easily eroded.

There’s so much to ponder and unpack. I am gobsmacked by this novel’s originality and complexity. I loved living in the eighteen-year old’s head. She may have come across as aloof and impenetrable, but she saw and understood more than anyone around. I even related to certain situations, despite having a different nationality. Somehow, in spite of the serious themes and undercurrents, this novel was quite amusing at times, not the slapstick kind of funny, but the kind derived from the absurdity of situations and people’s reactions.

This is where I gush about the importance of awards, especially for literary fiction, which seems to have become a niche genre. I read somewhere that each of the Man Booker short-listed novels sold less than six thousand copies in the UK. Had it not been for the Man Booker Prize, I, like many others, would have never come across this incredible novel. That would have been a shame.

Ms Burns, I take a bow and thank you for the words.