![]() ![]() ![]() In the novel, sexual desire – even when part of a consensual relationship – is frequently associated with fear. The milkman’s intimidating advances to the central character are entirely unwanted but, elsewhere in the novel, the longing she has for her “maybe-boyfriend” is also “dangerous, always dangerous”. The unnamed narrator, known only as “middle sister”, cannot love the man she chooses, her “maybe-boyfriend”, because the milkman has made thinly-veiled threats to kill him. Throughout Milkman, lust and desire are threatening, inescapable and habitually tinged with violence. Burns is astonishingly astute about the insidious ways that men coerce women and how women are trained to silence and second-guess their instincts about men – “he didn’t seem rude, so I couldn’t be rude”. It is much more than a novel about Belfast and much more than a sinister take on the dynamics of an older man’s obsession for a much younger woman. It’s a novel about failing to remember and failing to forget failing to speak and failing to remain silent. The novel is an unusual and beguiling piece of prose. ![]() Anna Burns’s Milkman, a very deserving candidate for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, is a strange, uncanny tale set in Belfast (although the city is never named) about a young woman trying to avoid the insistent and unwelcome sexual advances of a senior paramilitary figure, “the milkman”. ![]()
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