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Reread for a growing up course this Spring 2020, after rereading a second time last summer with a group of students. One of my very favorite books of 2019, and loved it again in 2020! I'll edit my review just a tad and add some notes at the end of the review to reflect my recent reading.

“’Still,' he said. 'Ach,' I said. 'Ach nothing,' he said. 'Ach sure,' I said. 'Ach sure what?' he said. 'Ach sure, if that's how you feel.' 'Ach sure, of course that's how I feel.' 'Ach all right then.' 'Ach,' he said. 'Ach,' I said. 'Ach,' he said. 'Ach,' I said. 'Ach.'

So that was settled.��

I almost never read Big Prize-winners close to the time of their winning, though I did read George Saunders�� Lincoln in the Bardo in less than a year from its publication date (and loved it) and I did the same with this book, also loving it. This might be the beginning of a trend for me! The book won the 2018 Man Booker prize and it is on the whole exhilarating to read. It's pretty long, 350 pages, but it's worth it; Anna Burns here reads like a refreshingly new voice, in a tone that was initially difficult for me to pick up, until I began listening to the fantastic audiotaped version by Brid Brennan, who is Irish and captures the deadpanned tone running through it. At first it just seemed like a kind of growing-up story with fresh language. Then something like black comedy. So I'll call it tragi-comedy, with real life horror and hilarity, in the guise of a kind of coming-of-age story in first person told by an unnamed 18-year-old woman whom we get to know only as middle sister.

The town would seem to be some northern Ireland town, say Belfast, where Burns grew up, but it is not named, the country is not named, the opposing factions and countries in conflict are never named, and no characters are named. Instead, we meet maybe boyfriend, ma, wee sisters, eldest sister, first brother-in-law, of course Milkman, another guy named real milkman, tablets girl, Somebody McSomebody and throughout we alternately laugh or are terrified, or laugh AS we are being terrified as middle sister tells her story.

Well, certainly this town, and this “hair trigger society,�� she describes was inspired by Burns’s Belfast, as she said: “I 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.��

The novel begins: “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,�� and it is more than 300 pages until we see what this sentence fully means.

The story takes place in the seventies, in the particularly violent time of The Troubles, with car bombs, informants, renouncers, and so on. “It was revenge and counter-revenge,�� middle sister writes, “reeling and spinning.�� Also a time when working-class people would not acknowledge depression or “the psychological,�� as in the severe depression suffered by da. A time when feminism would be seen by the local women as akin to Communism or satanism. As middle sister--who narrates the story from the decades ago she experienced these events--seems to have it, an interest in/obsession with James Bond movies in part informs the macho-psychotic paramilitary impulses with which males engage just as images of move starlets influence the fashion choices of girls and women (with perhaps more damaging effects to the world due to the male obsessions). We never hear in the book of a particular political conversation that drives the violence. It’s all just threats and surveillance and harassing and killing “suspected�� people. And the slaughter of cats and dogs, too, beware. There’s a layer here, too, of socio-sexual commentary, as terror/sexual harassment links to politics, informs relationships, especially ones for middle sister involving maybe boyfriend and Milkman and Somebody McSomebody.

So how does middle sister become a person of interest, undergoing surveillance, gossip, threat? She is seen, in public, reading books as she walks! Nineteenth-century books such as Ivanhoe! Do normal people do this?! And in a time of political violence? This is how we—Burns’s readers—come in, because WE would do this, so we begin to care a little about middle-sister, she becomes us to some extent. (Note: I listened to this audiobook while doing a lot of walking! Am I a crazy person, too?!) Middle sister is reserved, a bit of an introvert, she doesn’t want to get involved in politics, it's al insane, she has a first and “maybe�� boyfriend she isn’t particularly involved with, she's not understood by her family, she doesn’t have any close friends, and yet when she’s out walking, Milkman stops his van to talk with her and makes it clear that she has now—to him? according to others?—become a person of interest—is it sexual interest? Political interest? Both?

Middle sister is young, might we say on the cusp of adulthood? She doesn't really fully engage with all the madness, doesn't always seem to fully acknowledge the threat Milkman poses for her politically and sexually:

“At eighteen I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment.��

Her mother and the whole neighborhood become aware when Milkman stops to talk periodically with middle sister, and the rumors and gossip that follow lead to strange, absurd conclusions about her. Denial is futile for her; it's clear to them she's just lying in her denials of any relationship. It all gets increasingly hysterical, Monty Python or Kafka level:

“Next came abortions and I had to guess them also, from ‘vermifuge, squaw mint, Satan’s apple, premature expulsion, being failed in the course of coming into being�� with any doubt dispelled by, ‘Well, daughter, you can’t disappoint me anymore than you’ve already disappointed me, so tell me –what did you procure and which of them drab aunts did you procure it of?��

But how does middle sister really respond to the attentions of Milkman?

“I did not like the milkman and had been frightened and confused by his pursuing and attempting an affair with me,�� middle sister says. “I would be startled by every encounter, except the last, I was to have with this man.�� But no one believes her! Instead, they blame her for luring him away from his poor wife.

Either way, to be “of interest�� in a time of violent conflict is dangerous. We know this because people in middle sister’s family have been killed, seen as connecting with the other side, as having the wrong politics. And then middle sister appears to behave in a way that morally calls attention to herself, having a relationship with maybe boyfriend who doesn't live in the district, with whom she "stays over" while not being married, and then she's talking to a married man while walking, and so on.

Middle sister isn’t always sympathetic—Why doesn’t she talk about her real issues with maybe boyfriend? Why does she shut down rather than clearly confront her mother and the neighbor women about Milkman? To her credit, she tries sometimes to defend herself, but she sometimes doesn't yet know what she thinks about things, and sometimes when she talks they just call her a liar, so it takes some time for her to find her way through this morass of gossip and harassment and danger amid her own vulnerable confusion and silence.

"I came to understand how much I'd been thwarted into a carefully constructed nothingness by that man. Also by the community, by the very mental atmosphere, that minutiae of invasion."

At one point we are relieved as in a bar middle sister tells her former best friend the whole story, but are horrified as we understand this "friend" doesn't believe a word she says, and like the others, blames her for her predicament.

When this book is funny, it is very funny. For instance, in considering maybe boyfriend’s offer for her to move in with him, she sees the chaos of his twenty-year-old mechanic’s life, his cars, the accumulation of car parts in the house and considers how "maybe"-ness is the appropriate way to be with him:

“If we were in a proper relationship and I did live with him and was officially committed to him, first thing I would have to do would be to leave.��

There’s a similar (grim) joke she makes that would be familiar to anyone living in a violent area:

“According to the police, of course, our community was a rogue community. It was we who were the enemy, we who were the terrorists, the civilian terrorists, the associates of terrorists or simply individuals suspected of being but not yet discovered to be terrorists. That being the case, and understood by both parties to be the case, the only time you’d call the police in my area would be if you were going to shoot them, and naturally they would know this and so wouldn’t come.��

On some level the book explores dimensions of what it might mean to be in the “middle�� instead of being fully committed to something. “The truth was dawning on me of how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, be adult.�� This book is about divisive politics. And gender politics. And religion. And suppression of sexuality. And also the need to grow up at some point and become aware of things going on in the world. And it doesn't provide easy answers about how to deal with all these concerns.

There are three places in my first two readings of the book where I would have contended with Burns on her choices, the very points of resolution (I won’t name here) with maybe boyfriend, and Milkman, and McSomebody (three key men) where middle sister basically has choices taken away from her by the author. I wished middle sister had to make the choices as part of the process of growing up instead of conveniently having the choices made for her. But I still say it is a great, darkly hilarious book set in a time of violence, a novel for our times. Was there ever a time in which this topic was not of growing up amidst violence was not relevant?

A hopeful change happens in the end as middle sister’s ma, so anxious to marry her off so she can have babies, begins to have a relationship herself with real milkman (who is at one point mistaken for milkman and shot). Middle sister helping ma become a lover is a final and fun and hilarious turn to hope in this sometimes grim book that I look forward to reading again.

Okay, added notes in January 2020, but there's a bit more spoilerish material here, sorry: My third rereading of this book is affected by two things; 1) I began to see the whole book more in terms of the tropes of comedy, where ultimately All's Well That Ends Well. Crazy (that can be seen as funny) things happen in the book, throughout; everyone thinks she is having an affair with milkman, no one believes her, ever, and those three things I talk about above that I thought were conveniently happy things that happen in the end I now think are part of the comedy frame. Since the book has violence in it, because middle sister is being seriously stalked with real implications, I tended to think it was not supposed to be funny, but I think it is being real about the threats of sexual and other forms of violence to her AND being funny, it's that kind of humor; and it ends with love, an hilarious return to love for ma with the help of all her daughters, and love is restored for her with one of the few good guys, third brother-in-law. Bad male behavior is punished, good male behavior is rewarded, as in any good comedy, following Aristotle.

2) the other thing that changed for me in the reading of this book is one reviewer's comment that it makes a difference that middle sister reads all these big nineteenth century novels, because in many ways it feels like one, seeing the large scope of the psycho-sociological landscapes. I saw it this time more and more about what it means to be a teenaged girl (or any girl or woman) living in a patriarchal, male violent, male sexually-threatening society, including this dark comedy frame! One of the great ones, folks.