Anna Burns, _No Bones_

I THOUGHT SO highly of Milkman that it seemed a good bet to check out Burns's first novel, also set mainly in Belfast during the Troubles. Milkman is a stronger novel in a good many ways, but this is worthwhile--in fact, I adopted it for a course recently, and can attest that it was a hit with American undergraduates.

As a novel, No Bones is highly episodic, so much so that one wonders if it was conceived as a collection of short stories; the chapters are in many respects self-contained (hence eminently teachable), though they certainly gain from being read together. Almost all of the stories concern Amelia Lovett, one of many children in a large and turbulent family in Catholic Belfast. Amelia is of the same generation as and is temperamentally akin to the unnamed narrator of Milkman, but while the later novel is focused on a period of a few months or perhaps a year, here we see Amelia from childhood to her early thirties.

Horrors occur. Protestant rioters attack her family's home, relatives are murdered, brothers recruited into the Provisionals only to mysteriously disappear. No matter what happens, the same deadpan, darkly humorous, drily satirical tone prevails, much as in Milkman, and as in Milkman the reader begins to hear the resolutely unsentimental, unimpressed, no-bones-about-it tone as an attempt at self-protection, as armor, as disguise, as a way of keeping the trauma at arm's length.

Trauma is a wily wrestler, though. It has broken down better defenses than yours. Amelia escapes to England, but the trauma is still brewing away inside her, leading to breakdown and institutionalization; in the book's final chapter, peace is breaking out, but we can tell that no treaty can bring an end to the long-term effects of the constant fear Amelia and her friends have grown up with.

Excellent book.