Hardly anyone in the book has a proper name they’re given only a referent. The story’s hero instead lays blame on the town (likely Belfast), which feels like a separate character. They aren’t held accountable for their crimes, and the crimes committed against them aren’t avenged. Burns’s characters are so downtrodden by the state of things that they sink to performing - or consenting to - intimate acts of violence. Faith in one’s own perceptions, too: Above all else, this story is about how a divided and untrusting community undermines its own citizens - a process that sounds familiar to us. Hearsay abounds in the vacuum left by diminished faith in institutions. And her characters’ struggles are timely. Like last year’s winner, George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, it’s an unconventional historical novel, one that coruscates between past and present, upending the genre itself.Īlthough Burns makes it possible to deduce that Milkman is set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, she scrubs her plot of grounding details, inviting the reader to draw connections between her past and our present. It doesn’t span generations or continents it’s not a staid reflection on the nuclear family. Anna Burns’s Milkman - the winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize - doesn’t meet the criteria we’ve come to expect from award-winning books.
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