But at the same time, I can see how and why that exact style won this book its awards.
Ultimately, I appreciated this one more than I enjoyed it I just think I wasn’t in the right headspace for the dense, meandering narrative style. The book dances around a lot of big themes, like violence against women, gender roles, the danger of staying silent, and the fear of allowing yourself to be happy (because what if it’s then lost). And her refusal to defend herself as she keeps her head down doesn’t help anything. A rumor that she’s his mistress absolutely flies off the rails until it might as well be true for the way her life is altered. Then a man known as the milkman (who isn’t a milkman but really a paramilitary man who’s feared and respected among the renouncers) notices her and stops to chat. She reads while walking, she conveniently forgets inconvenient experiences, and she is genuinely never curious about anything because she does not wish to change her world. The narrator of the story is middle sister, who does everything she can to mentally distance herself from the political situation. No one is trusted, nothing foreign is allowed, no cracks in anyone’s facade can show. The community is fiercely divided between the state and the renouncers, where even going to the hospital is dangerous because the police might question you so the renouncers will think you’re a spy and kill you. The story takes place in an unnamed time and place that we come to understand is based on Belfast, Ireland during the height of the political conflict known as The Troubles in the 1970s.
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. I read it over so many times I can recite it from memory: The opening line blew me away and will make my list for all-time favorite first sentences. In some ways, it met those expectations, it being an impressive work of literature and storytelling that transports and illuminates. Milkman has been on my list for a while as I’ve made my way through the 2019 Women’s Prize shortlist. I was too buzzy to read, thinking of teacher, of her manner of saying there were sunsets every day, that we weren’t meant to be coffined and buried whilst all the time still living, that nothing of the dark was so enormous that never could we surmount it, that always there were new chapters, that we must let go of the old, open ourselves to symbolism, to the most unexpected of interpretations, that we must too, uncover what we’ve kept hidden, what we think we might have lost.
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