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Fear has a crushing weight to it. It changes you, bends you into the shape you weren’t meant to be, controls your very existence.

“Life here, said real milkman, simply has to be lived and died in extremes.��

Although I’ve seen it described as darkly funny, to me this book was quietly angry. Angry at the crushing and bleak oppressiveness and claustrophobia of the world described, the world of judgmental gossip, habitual violence, enforced conformity and resigned fatalism. And above all that, the fear and distrust that govern the lives there, split along the stark lines of “us�� and “them��, and the trauma of it all.

“It was being rumoured that way, he said, because that was the thing people invented here because you couldn’t just die here, couldn’t have an ordinary death here, not anymore, not of natural causes, not by accident such as falling out a window, especially not after all the other violent deaths taking place in this district now. It had to be political, he said. Had to be about the border, meaning comprehensible.��

Set in the 1970s Northern Ireland during the Troubles, it gives us a perspective of a young woman in a Renouncer community who has already committed the cardinal offense against expected normality by always reading-while-walking in attempt to keep to herself �� and that’s before a local paramilitary leader known as “the Milkman�� sets his sights on her and starts stalking her, claiming her in the eyes of the insular community as his mistress, with it isolating her and rewriting her life in the eyes of others while she’s powerless to stop it, turning her “into a carefully constructed nothingness��.

“At the time, age eighteen, having been brought up in a hair-trigger society where the ground rules were �� 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, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn’t there? At eighteen I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment. I had a feeling for them, an intuition, a sense of repugnance for some situations and some people, but I did not know intuition and repugnance counted, did not know I had a right not to like, not to have to put up with, anybody and everybody coming near.��

In this insular, tribalist, oppressive world everything is political, even the smallest everyday things. The smallest mundanities, the tiniest slip-up will mark you as belonging to “us�� or “them�� �� a hospital visit, a name, a store you shop in. Paramilitaries, unionists, nationalists, religious clashes, car bombs, vigilante justice, raids, curfews �� all of that determines life rhythms and order. But just as much do the other things, the internal policing people do of themselves, the pervasive oppressive gossip and rumors that rule lives, the lack of privacy in communities where everything is everyone’s business, the strict customs and rampant accepted patriarchy and harassment, the strict roles one is expected to perform, the crushing weight of social pressure that is apt to quickly isolate those who dare to not conform and therefore are relegated to “beyond-the-pale�� category.

“‘Us�� and ‘them�� was second nature: convenient, familiar, insider, and these words were off-the-cuff, without the strain of having to remember and grapple with massaged phrases or diplomatically correct niceties.��

It’s an odd book, written in wall-to-wall text and seemingly endless sentences in a strangely stylized narrative voice that often slides into an oddly stilted formality, skips any personal names (“middle sister��, “third brother-in-law��, “maybe-boyfriend�� are the identifiers here, with the closest to a name we come is Somebody McSomebody), uses dry almost-humor in which even absurd situations still remain heartbreakingly painfully real. It’s satirical, but in a seriously so, the way that almost brings helpless tears to the eyes at the horrific absurdity that reality can be.

“Also, in a district that thrived on suspicion, supposition and imprecision, where everything was so back-to-front it was impossible to tell a story properly, or not tell it but just remain quiet, nothing could get said here or not said but it was turned into gospel.��

It’s a hard to read book, and yet something about it grabbed me and didn’t let go. And that possibly hint of hope in the end, of changes, of lessening fear, of letting go of protective numbness and daring to try to find joy even in bleak times, of a breath of fresh air even on the most suffocating day.

“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 present, be adult.��

4 stars. You’ll love it or hate it �� and for me it hit the right (although uncomfortable) spot.

—�Ĕ�Ĕ�Ĕ���
Recommended by Nastya.

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