Her voice, however, is less Zola than Yoda (‘Shifted too, my fears did’). The unnamed narrator reads a lot, arousing suspicion in her community by burying her head in 19th-century novels while walking the streets. Many sentences take several readings to approach comprehensibility: ‘By this he was discomfited but had faith that once she came to with the help of his improvised despotism, she would remember who she was and indignantly reclaim her something beyond the physical once again.’ It’s not so much a stream as an eddy of consciousness. The narrative style in Milkman is screened and distorted through the mind of an eighteen-year-old girl in an unnamed city that’s almost certainly Belfast at the height of the Troubles (an elastic term, but the book is set in the early 1970s). Burns is not a crowd-pleaser she’s more of the Van Morrison school, playing with her back to the audience. What is the best way to begin a book? Anna Burns, in her third novel, has gone for the now-read-on approach: ‘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.’ But if this sounds like an eye-catching opener up there with Iain Banks’s ‘It was the day my grandmother exploded’, think again.
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