Anna Burns, _Milkman_

THIS MAY SOUND odd, but Milkman put me in mind of Thomas Bernhard--or, maybe closer to home for the Irish Burns, the Beckett of Molloy--in that the narrative voice does the same dance of revealing and concealing, garrulousness and reticence. The voice has its particular tics, obsessively circles facts and feelings it does not quite wish to name, wants mainly to stay out of trouble but sometimes finds itself rising on wings of indignation or of anger or of love.

The voice here is younger than that of Bernhard's or Beckett's speakers, funnier, easier to like, and female, but as with those writers, it's the voice that hooks you, even before you have grasped the situation.

The situation is interesting, though. We are in Belfast in the late 1970s, and the narrator, a young woman of maybe eighteen, Catholic and living at home, becomes the object of the attentions of a powerful IRA figure, older and married. Most of the novel is about his stalking her and the ripples his attention sends through the narrator's family, friends, and neighborhood.

However--and here is a brilliant bit--the words "Belfast," "IRA," and "Catholic" never appear. For that matter, proper nouns as a class are resolutely banned, even names. The narrator is simply "middle sister" (of a family that includes the "wee sisters," "second brother," "first brother-in-law," and so on). The young man she is in an intermittently serious relationship with is simply "maybe-boyfriend." People in the neighborhood are "tablets girl" or "real milkman," the last-named so designated because he is actually a milkman, unlike "Milkman," the IRA chieftain stalking our narrator, so designated because of his white van. The closest we get to an actual name is minor character "Somebody McSomebody."

These identifying tags (as a reader, one adjusts to them quickly) emphasize that we are in a world where certain facts and identities have to be known and taken into account--failing to do so could literally be fatal--and yet cannot be named or discussed. Even when the book is funny, as it is often is, this minefield of taboos and unspeakable realities conjures up omnipresent dread (another link to Bernhard and Beckett).

The narrative voice's avoidance of proper nouns (the IRA are "the renouncers," England is the nation "over the water") also evokes the narrator's wish to be apart, elsewhere, even while she has to be where she is, a wish reflected behaviorally by her habit of reading 19th century novels while walking about the streets--a way of disappearing that only makes her more noticeable, unfortunately, and noticed she is, by the mysterious but powerful man in the white van.

Milkman is a tour de force of technique, but also makes the useful point that when societies are in violent conflict with themselves, that does not simply create some kind of backdrop against which ordinary life occurs--no, it bleeds (again, sometimes literally) into ordinary life, altering every family relationship, every friendship, making even such apparently universal and timeless commonplaces as that sunsets are beautiful, or that one ought to marry the person one loves, into war zones.