Milkman

The most immediately striking thing about Milkman is Burns’ writing style—for instance, the absence of names, or the simultaneously stilted and rambling voice Burns creates for middle sister. Middle sister is clearly intelligent and well-read, but her use of what she might call “high-flying” (21) language frequently coincides with awkward sentence constructions and various bits of slang. This idiosyncratic style is partly a function of the novel’s setting. Middle sister lives in a working-class, separatist, and Catholic district of Northern Ireland. Her use of English is thus in some sense a reminder of the language’s historical relationship to British imperialism; if Ireland had not been colonized, middle sister wouldn’t be speaking English at all. On the other hand, the fact that middle sister does mix “quintessential ‘over the water’ language” (21) with her own unique phrasings suggests that it may be possible to repurpose English to suit the needs of those it has been imposed on—in this case, the Irish.

This speaks to a broader point about language in the novel: It is intertwined with questions of identity and authority. Part of the reason why middle sister speaks in a convoluted manner is because it’s so difficult for her to speak at all; she is marginalized not only on the basis of her ethnicity and religion, but also by her gender. In middle sister’s community, “certain girls [are] not [...] tolerated if it was deemed they did not defer to males, did not acknowledge to the superiority of males, might even go so far as almost to contradict males” (8). For middle sister, the importance of respecting men’s authority is so ingrained that she can’t find the words to resist milkman even when she wants to; there is no readily available script for rejecting a man who isn’t being openly rude. Partly for this reason, milkman doesn’t even have to resort to the overtly misogynistic language of someone like first brother-in-law to assert his authority over middle sister. The social clout milkman enjoys as a member of the paramilitary gives him even more leverage in these interactions; as someone who both protects and extorts the community, his standing is similar to that of both a policeman and a mob boss. As a result, the threat of violence is implicit whenever he approaches middle sister, even though “he uttered no direct words by way of forwarding on this attraction” and “asked nothing of [her]” (6).    

Burns’ use of language—specifically, the reliance on middle sister’s distinctive narrative voice—also reflects the novel’s prioritization of psychology over plot. In fact, several of the novel’s most dramatic events (like the assassination of milkman) happen offscreen, while middle sister’s frequent digressions break up any momentum the plot might otherwise generate. In this way, Burns keeps the narrative’s focus not on the Troubles or on misogyny in and of themselves, but on the harmful effects violence and conflict have on the psyche. These effects are by no means confined to middle sister, but Burns does use two particular motifs associated with her to illustrate them: “reading-while-walking” and “jamais vu.” As middle sister explains when challenged by third brother-in-law, she reads while walking as a way of partially blinding herself to her the world around her; in this way, she not only blunts the emotional impact of the ever-present violence, but safeguards against seeing or hearing something illicit or illegal. Jamais vu (French for “never seen”), meanwhile, is the term middle sister uses to describe willful amnesia of the kind that allows her to immediately forget she’s being surveilled: When third brother-in-law asks her what she intends to do about the photographer, she states, “Well, I was going to have amnesia of course. In fact, here I was, already having it. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said. ‘I’ve forgotten,’” (66).

These two motifs, then, exemplify some of the ways in which the novel’s characters try to reconcile the tensions and contradictions of life during the Troubles: for instance, the need to be both aware and unaware of one’s surroundings. Arguably, the novel’s style embodies a similar paradox, since the wordiness of middle sister’s narration can be seen as both clarifying and muddying her underlying point. Here, for instance, is how she describes maybe-boyfriend’s neighbor’s talking about the supercharger:

Historical injustice, he said. Repressive legislation, he said. Practice of and pacts for, he said. Artificial boundaries, he said. Propping up of corruption, he said. Arrest without charge, he said. Declaration of curfews, he said. Imprisonment without trial, he said. Proscription of meetings, he said (26).

This list continues, and is notable for the way in which it talks extensively about one thing (Britain’s historical relationship to Ireland) without ever stating the speaker’s actual point: that maybe-boyfriend’s possession of the supercharger could be interpreted as traitorous, and that the neighbor knows this and is consequently in a position to leverage that information. This sort of coded language is common in Milkman, and is part of the way in which Burns attempts to create, for the novel’s reader, the disorienting and contradictory environment in which middle sister lives.