Sara García

17/10/2022
Anna Burns. Milkman (2018)
A very recent novel that received many awards (Man booker Prize)
Anna Burns was born in Belfast in 1962. She was raised in a working-class Catholic
district. She moved to London in 1987. Since 2014 she has lived in East Sussex
(England). Novels: No Bones (2001), Little Constructions (2007), Milkman (2018).
Novella (the name for short novels): Mostly Hero (2014).
It took ten months to write the book, she had no money. Humorous novel. The
protagonist also lives in a working-class catholic district.

From 1968 to 1998, the Northern Ireland Conflict. She was born a few years before the
crack of the conflict. Few more protestants than Catholics. The pattern of living in
Northern Ireland. She left in 1987, before the resolution, at least partial, of the conflict
(The Peace Agreement/The Good Friday Agreement 1998). Apart from leaving London,
she moved to East Sussex. The conflict in the Basque country.

Psychological fiction. It is a coming-of-age novel (from being like a child to being a

mature person, the age or occasion when one formally becomes an adult.). What we see
is that this novel is about memory, remembering what happened in the past because
there is a moment in the first two chapters where you are told that the time of the
narration is twenty years later, we have a narrator that twenty years later remembers
what happened twenty years earlier. 

The time of the narrated. The novel alludes to the 1970s, there is a moment in the first
two chapters the narrator says “in the 1970s” (all the 1970s or a specific year). In order
to situate the exact year, we search for/look up cultural references (movies,
books/documentaries, etc). There is a reference to the movie/film “Alien” with
Sigourney Weaver appearing in it as the woman who defeats the Alien. When was Alien
released? in 1979, so it can’t be earlier than that. We have a tentative date, 1979; if we
compare this with Anna Burns’ life, at that time, she will be between 18-19. How old is
the protagonist of this novel? The novel tells us 18 years old. It matches (a few months
before or later) Anna Burn’s biography.

The time of the narration. Is 20 years after the events.

 1999: Very interesting year, it is one year after the Peace Agreement. Troubles
came to an end. You remember the emotions expressed in the poem by Lorna
Shaughnessy, a poem about 1998. Emotions expressed about the hope of a new
life starting. The perspective in the book is one of hope, one of relief and I
simply want you to pay attention when you read the novel, and in the first two
chapters, you have examples of that, examples in which the narrator says from
now this perspective, from this present moment of enlightenment, the past was
like that. 
The contrast between the present moment (1999) and the period of the troubles in the
late 1970s. Also, notice that this narrator is not 18 anymore. She is much more mature
and capable of understanding what happened. Do you remember “The Sunnyside”
poem? The poem is about the bomb explosion the bomb thrown through the window,
etc. The fact that the poetic persona said that her friend (the girl that suffered in her
family home the attack), had to wait several decades before she could speak about this.
Here we have the same thing, we have twenty years that have been necessary for the
narrator to be able to tell her story. The narrator has to wait a lot of time to speak about
 Sara García

her truth. This is a good example of trauma. Sometimes you measure the trauma by the
time the victim needs in order to be able to speak about it.  Taboo, not being able to
speak about things, people prefer to forget. 
This novel then is an exercise in memory, a need to tell the story in order to/so that it
won’t be forgotten. Memory vs. Amnesia. This is very important because in the novel
you have quite a few references to the fact that the protagonist, for instance, forgets
things. There is the use of a French expression jamais vu (nunca visto).That is that she
found herself in situations that she thinks she sees for the first time but it’s not the first
time, she has forgotten. This is a sort of device of her, probably brain, in order to not
accumulate the painful situations. In the novel, there are many references to forgetting,
so is very interesting that this novel is precisely about not forgetting.

The spatial setting. One curiosity about this novel is that no characters and no places
are called by their name, and this is something you may think about, why? As readers is
preferable to look at it in a different way, not what the writer wants to say (intentional
fallacy) but the effect that it provokes in readers. So, the references to Northern Ireland
and Belfast are certainly very oblique, you never have those names clearly stated but
you recognize the places, easily recognizable places. Here we have the fact that you
don’t say “It’s Belfast”, this allows the writer much more creative freedom. The place
here actually stands in an allegorical manner for any other places with similar
characteristics, conditions or problems. Very strong surveillance, she even uses the
word paranoia.

The themes. 
  The theme of MEMORY vs. FORGETTING is crucial, not only because there
are references in the novel to the fact that people forget and other people have to
remind them, but because the narrative structure is based on that (as Manuela
said before, this is a story told 20 years later, the jamais vu. Also, the US vs.
THEM, these categories simplify things too much. Actually, the novel is about
the conflicts within us, so this category, normally, homogenizes people like us
(even in Galicia xeración Nós). This idea of a homogenous group that the novel,
from the very beginning, begins to demolish, there is no homogeneous us, there
are many conflicts within that us (class conflicts, educational conflicts, different
political approaches, very important gender conflict, the society is incredibly
patriarchal, conservative, and Catholic).
 Regarding the topic of surveillance (control of the population). All the novels
and fiction that Manuela knows about Northern Ireland include this because it
seems that in this period everybody was controlled by all the rest (by the English
and even by your people). You should not deviate from the path that you have
been assigned. 
 Violence. Even the first line of the novel, the first sentence. “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” There is a lot of violence from
the very first sentence. There are many types of violence; psychological
violence, sexual harassment as well, and political violence.
 Sexual harassment (a central conflict, the man that harasses the protagonist/
young woman). Following her because he wants to go out with her. 
 How do people cope with this? With all the strategies you use in order to cope
with this type of violence. Sometimes they are logical things and sometimes they
are very bizarre reactions. Because, if a situation is bizarre probably the reaction
 Sara García

is going to be bizarre too.  For instance, the protagonist, she reads while walking
and she says “I read 19th-century novels because I don’t like the 20th century
(she doesn't like the Troubles). Who likes to live in a place like that one during
the troubles? The people left. Another strategy for coping is forgetting, saying it
is not so important, saying it never happened (denial) 

The plot. This novel has a round structure, the first sentence anticipates the end (the
title of the book is Milkman, and the intrigue is who is this Milkman?). The very
beginning of the novel is about the end, about the Milkman finally being killed by the
state. The state is the UK, Northern Ireland is part of the UK. Spoiled reader? No, the
real intrigue is: what kind of conflict does this Milkman provoke? The conflict is about
the tensions between the protagonist and her community (the mother wants her to
marry, she says “from the age of 16 my mother began to talk to me about marrying”).
Her mother had ten children and it is not so extraordinary in Ireland. The effects of the
historical context will affect the other context. Broader political context. Conflict in the
Milkman’s harassment. 

The narrator is now 38 years old woman that talks about her experiences 20 years
earlier when she was 18. This is a tragicomic voice; it is black humour. In this
conversational tone, some people talk about this as extreme of consciousness because
you often find this tone as if she was simply speaking or in a very informal way about
what happened. There are even Northern Ireland colloquial expressions. At the same
time, and this is contradictory, it makes the effect of humour as well, the narrator uses
very sophisticated/cultured language. To us, it is very easy to understand due to our
speaking of Romanic languages (Latin etymology). For the English public/audience,
these words sound very strange. There are also repetitions and accumulation (saying the
same idea repeatedly, but every time she mentions the same idea, she adds semantic
twists). We have many digressions (she is running in the park with her brother-in-law
and then she begins to tell you about this happening in the past) and flashbacks, the
novel also has anticipations (because obviously, the narrator knows what is going to
happen later). There are very interesting psychological studies about the detailed
pondering of the conflicts around. 

The characters are referred to by their Alias (McSomebody), which is clear from the
beginning. This is humorous because the Mc is common between names in Ireland,
indicative of family relationships. Here we have the expression of the relations that
some characters have with other characters. The intrigue about the Milkman is because
he is not a man delivering milk, but there is the idea that sometimes bombs were put
into milk containers. He could be called Milkman, for this reason, he is a forty-one-
year-old paramilitary. This is important because then you will think that in the Catholic
district, he is the boss, and then you will likely think that he is someone from the IRA
(at that time it was a terrorist group from the point of view of English, for nationalist
Irish people they will be heroes). The novel is very critical of the power that these
people accumulated and how they oppressed/controlled their own people. Maybe-
boyfriend, explains the relationship very well, let's say that
sometimes the ellipsis is very enlightening about the relationship
they have.
 Sara García

A map of the British Isles. Belfast is so close to Scotland. The reason why there are so
many protestants. The balance between Catholics and Protestants. Indigenous people
were Catholics. 
Summary of the survey of English colonisation. History of the progressive
occupation by the British.
 11th C: Anglo-Norman intervention in Irish clans' conflicts. 
 16th C: Ireland was progressively dominated by the English.
 1607: Flight of the Earls (exile and dispossession after the battle of Kinsale)
 1610: Beginning of the Ulster Plantation. Sometimes people confuse Northern
Ireland with Ulster. Ulster is nowadays a region that is bigger than Northern
Ireland (it has more counties). When they say “beginning of the Ulster
plantation” that refers to those settlers coming from Scotland and the rest of
Britain. 
 1649: Oliver Cromwell conquers Ireland.
 1690: Battle of the Boyne (William of Orange against James Stuart). Protestant
hegemony in Ireland. William of Orange was protestant and that started
protestant hegemony in Ireland, in the whole isle. Even nowadays there is a very
tense day in Northern Ireland because the “Orangists” (defendants of the
protestant and unionist ideology) proudly parade through Catholic districts.
William of Orange still has political significance in Ireland.
 1800: Act of Union (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland). Tired of the
conflicts. 
 1916: Easter Rising.
 1919-1921: War of Independence.
 1921: Irish Free State created (Northern Ireland remains part of the UK)
 1922-1923: Civil War
 1949: the Republic of Ireland (Ireland leaves the Commonwealth). Only became
a republic in 1949.
 1968: Beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.