79 pages • 2 hours read
Anna BurnsMilkman
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
While at the bar with longest friend, middle sister is approached by “tablets girl”—a mentally disturbed young woman who is always trying to slip poison into people’s drinks. She accuses middle sister of conspiring with milkman to kill tablets girl during a prior existence in the 17th century. Unbeknownst to middle sister, tablets girl also doses her drink; middle sister doesn’t even realize that she’s been poisoned when she wakes up vomiting hours later, ascribing her sickness to stress.
Middle sister’s groans wake up her younger sisters and mother, who assumes she’s either pregnant or has been poisoned by milkman’s jealous wife. Like many women in the community, ma is an amateur physician, and she begins preparing a mixture to purge the poison. Several neighbors arrive to assist, remarking that middle sister’s symptoms are similar to those of tablets girl’s “shiny” sister, whom tablets girl recently poisoned. Nevertheless, everyone assumes middle sister’s sickness must have something to do with milkman, and they caution ma against taking her daughter to the hospital: the community views hospitals with suspicion even under the best of circumstances, and believes that in this case, the police might try to use middle sister’s association with milkman to flip her.
Middle sister remains ill and confused for the next four days. When she finally regains full consciousness, wee sisters tell her that several paramilitaries stopped by the house earlier that day. She later learns from ma that tablets girl has been murdered, and that the paramilitaries—who had previously been considering assassinating her themselves—are now searching for her killer. It finally dawns on middle sister that tablets girl poisoned her, and that the paramilitaries visited to learn if she had an alibi.
Roughly two weeks later, middle sister is fully recovered and decides to pick up chips (i.e. fries) for herself and wee sisters at a local shop. When she arrives, she’s puzzled to see the long line of customers fall away in front of her. Odder still, the person who hands middle sister her order doesn’t take her money. The episode leads middle sister to realize that everyone believes milkman murdered tablets girl on her behalf, and that her very presence is now seen as a tacit threat.
Chapter 5 Analysis
At first glance, the events of this chapter might seem disconnected from the novel’s overarching plot. Thematically, however, the circumstances surrounding middle sister’s poisoning and its aftermath continue to build on ideas Burns introduces in Milkman’s first few chapters. For one, the public attitude towards tablets girl and her actions is yet another indication of how traumatized the community at large is. As dangerous as tablets girl is, no one except (eventually) the paramilitaries thinks there is any point in trying to control her: “It never occurred to anybody though, that she should be barred from the popular club. Nor either, that she should be hospitalised, jailed, that her family shouldn’t let her out” (218). This is partly a reflection of the fact that the community’s faith in any sort of public institution is fundamentally and justifiably broken; the government views everyone in her community as the enemy, so there’s little to be gained (but potentially a great deal to lose) by going to the police, the hospital, etc.
At an even more basic level, the community is simply used to violence as a fact of life. In the context of the Troubles, tablets girl’s actions don’t seem particularly shocking: “Menace that she was, in that different time, during that different consciousness, and with all that other approach to life and to death and to custom, she was tolerated, just as the weather was tolerated” (218). In fact, to people like ma, the most upsetting thing about tablets girl’s own murder is not that it happened, but rather that it doesn’t fit into the broader patter of political violence:
Ordinary murders were eerie, unfathomable, the exact murders that didn’t happen here. People had no idea how to gauge them, how to categorise them, how to begin a discussion on them, and that was because only political murders happened in this place (237).
Life in middle sister’s neighborhood may be dangerous, but it is generally dangerous in a way that seems familiar.
With that said, there are moments throughout the novel when the community’s willingness to tolerate their circumstances wears thin, and in these instances, it’s women who typically spearhead the resistance. A good example of this comes in Chapter 3, when middle sister describes the neighborhood women staging a mass protest. Their immediate goal is to overturn a curfew, but implicitly, they’re also protesting what middle sister calls the “toybox mentality”: the militarism and masculine posturing that—to women facing “nappies to be changed, housework to be done, [and] shopping to be got in” (159)—seems childish and impractical.
The ultimate success of this protest demonstrates that—deeply embedded as patriarchal norms are in the community—the women who live there can be a powerful force when acting collectively. The rapid response to middle sister’s poisoning offers another example of this kind of female solidarity, albeit in very different circumstances. There is even a moment when the rift between middle sister and ma—itself the result of differing ideas about how women should behave—seems likely to heal; ma asks her daughter in good faith about the events leading up to her sickness, and middle sister reflects, “I felt a comfort go through me, a sense of solace descend on me, all because she’d paused in her admonition to consider I might be telling the truth. It could be easy to love her” (224). The moment passes, but it lays the groundwork for the tentative reconciliation that takes place between middle sister and her mother in Milkman’s final chapter.
