Milkman

Names are one of the primary ways in which Burns illustrates the way language intersects with identity and power. As middle sister explains, there is a long list of names that are tacitly off-limits within her community because of their perceived Britishness:

The names were not allowed for the reason they were too much of the country ‘over the water’, with it no matter that some of those names hadn’t originated in that country but instead had been appropriated and put to use by the people of that land (23).

The banned names therefore serve as a sign of in-group membership (to Irish separatists) as well as an indication of the reach of British imperialism; Britain’s “appropriation” of Ireland extends to something as personal as names and as inescapable as language.

Of course, the most notable thing about the way names function in Milkman is Burns’ choice not to refer to her characters by name. Instead, she largely identifies them based on their relationships to others (e.g. the “maybe-boyfriend” of “middle sister”) or by noteworthy traits or behaviors (e.g. “tablets girl”). This in part reflects Burns’ stated desire to write a novel that would be relevant outside of Northern Ireland; by referring to characters in generic terms, she broadens the story’s applicability to other war-torn or oppressive communities.

However, the insistence on people’s social roles (as a daughter, a milkman, or even as an outcast beyond-the-pale) also underscores the fact that the community Burns depicts is deeply preoccupied with order and conformity. Because of the external threat it faces in the form of the Northern Irish and British forces, the separatist community is constantly policing itself in an attempt to eliminate any ambiguity about who its members are and where they stand. Seeing people primarily in terms of who they are to those around them is an extension of this, but it carries with it its own disadvantages. This becomes especially clear when, in the wake of milkman’s death, the community learns that “Milkman” was in fact his real surname and not a code name. In other words, the idea of who milkman was to the community was so powerful that it obscured who he actually seems to have been:

[T]he news of this Milkman name unsettled people; it cheated them, frightened them [...] Had he been the chilling, sinister paramilitary everyone here had always believed him to be? Or was it the case that poor Mister Milkman had been nothing but another innocent victim of state murder after all? (305).

In this way, the episode illustrates how public consensus can overwrite reality to such an extent that the truth becomes impossible to find.

The significance of the supercharger hinges on the fact that some versions of the car it came from—a Blower Bentley—are embellished with a British flag. In the community where middle sister and maybe-boyfriend live, this quickly becomes a point of contention, with one of maybe-boyfriend’s neighbors questioning how anyone committed to the separatist cause could accept any part of a car associated with British patriotism. This issue of the supercharger looms over the rest of the novel, since it could conceivably furnish proof in a paramilitary court that maybe-boyfriend is an informer.

What is especially noteworthy about this, however, is that no one seriously believes maybe-boyfriend is working for the other side. Rather, the supercharger is a smokescreen for people to pursue their own personal agendas under the guise of politics; the paramilitaries who pressure maybe-boyfriend to sell the part do so because they want a cut of the profits, while milkman uses the issue as leverage over middle sister. The supercharger, then, symbolizes the ways those in power capitalize on confusion and paranoia. The supercharger itself doesn’t bear a flag, and in fact it’s never clear that the particular car it came from did. However, in a community that is as paranoid as this one is, even the absence of evidence provides an opportunity for people like milkman to muddy the waters in a way that suits their own corrupt purposes.

“Jamais vu” is a term middle sister coins to describe one of the ways in which she copes with the stress of her environment. Unlike “déjà vu,” which refers to the sensation of having previously been through an otherwise unfamiliar experience, “jamais vu” is a repetitive forgetting of familiar experiences. Although the term first arises in connection to the ambiguous status of middle sister and maybe-boyfriend’s relationship, it serves to illustrate the impossible demands that life during the Troubles places on a person’s psyche.

For a variety of reasons, an individual’s ability to survive in middle sister’s community hinges on their ability to “forget” information that in reality they know full well. In extreme cases, knowledge can actually threaten a person’s physical survival, since it can make them a liability to either the paramilitaries or the state itself. Even when life is not at stake, sanity may be: Those who can’t filter out the violence that surrounds them will likely be unable to function on a day-to-day basis. Middle sister, for instance, talks about “the dichotomy, the cauterising, the jamais vu, the blanking-out” (113) as a way of preserving one’s support for the separatist cause even when the separatists commit acts of extreme brutality. In this passage and others like it, the jamais vu motif encapsulates the kind of cognitive splitting or dissonance that results from ongoing trauma and violence.      

The 19th-century (or earlier) books that middle sister favors symbolize her attempts to detach herself from life amidst the Troubles. This is something middle sister herself freely acknowledges:

Every weekday, rain or shine, gunplay or bombs, stand-off or riots, I preferred to walk home reading my latest book. This would be a nineteenth-century book because I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century (5).

The attraction, however, isn’t simply that these books allow middle sister to ignore the world around her in favor of a different (and often fictional) one. As the above passage notes, middle sister often reads while walking, and this habit isn’t so much a form of escapism as it is what she calls a “vigilance not to be vigilant” (65)—that is, a way of ensuring she doesn’t absorb any information that might prove dangerous to know. In this sense, the books middle sister reads and the way in which she reads them are her solution to the irreconcilable demands of life in a divided and violence-prone community: in this case, to be simultaneously aware and unaware of one’s surroundings. The rest of the neighborhood, however, sees middle sister’s reading simply as disinterest and disengagement, and it becomes a reason for mistrusting and ostracizing her. 

Sunsets are an important motif in the novel, helping to illustrate both the psychological impact of trauma and the ways in which “common knowledge” can take on a life of its own. Middle sister describes two particular sunsets at length: one that maybe-boyfriend persuades her to go see with him, and one that her French teacher insists the class look at and describe. In both cases, middle sister describes the experience as unsettling, largely because it flies in the face of what the community at large considers acceptable. Given how much of a struggle it is simply to survive in middle sister’s community, any kind of aesthetic interests seem superfluous and self-indulgent. This is particularly true, middle sister suggests, for maybe-boyfriend and other men, since gender norms associating art and beauty with femininity compound the more general suspicion of such interests: “[T]hen I thought, how come he has thoughts of seeing a sun go down when nobody I knew—especially boys, also girls, women too, men too, certainly me—has ever had a thought of seeing a sun go down?” (44).

If anything, the sunset the French teacher points out provokes an even deeper anxiety. As middle sister explains, the received wisdom amongst the class is that the sky can be blue, black, or white. Although the students are obviously aware on some level that the sky can take on many other colors during a sunset, acknowledging this would mean flouting public opinion in a way they find unsettling:

If what she was saying was true, that the sky—out there—not out there—whatever—could be any colour, that meant anything could be any colour, that anything could be anything, that anything could happen, at any time, in any place, in the whole of the world, and to anybody (72-73).

Here, middle sister suggests that the need to decisively pin down the color of the sky is part of the community’s broader need for certainty, which itself results from the extreme precariousness of life during the Troubles: It is an attempt to impose order on a chaotic world. It’s also, as she notes earlier, the community’s preemptive effort to shield itself from further suffering:

[W]hat if it was nice, whatever it was, and we liked it, got used to it, were cheered up by it, came to rely upon it, only for it to go away, or be wrenched away, never to come back again? Better not to have had it in the first place was the prevailing feeling, and that was why blue was the colour for our sky to be (71).

Burns uses the sunset motif to explore the link between the psychological effects of trauma and the pressure to conform.

As milkman’s stalking intensifies, middle sister begins to experience physical sensations she describes as “anti-orgasms”:

There had been a movement unnatural, an omen of warning, originating in the coccyx, with its vibration then setting off ripples—ugly, rapid, threatening ripples—travelling into my buttocks, gathering speed into my hamstrings from where, inside a moment, they sped to the dark recesses behind my knees and disappeared (79).

This feeling, which is later sometimes accompanied by a loss of sensation in her legs, is in part a measure of milkman’s ability to invade middle sister’s body without actually touching her. In other words, these anti-orgasms serve as a reminder that misogynistic violence is not confined to overt physical or sexual abuse.

Unpleasant as they are, however, these feelings serve a useful purpose as a kind of alarm system, alerting middle sister both to milkman’s presence and to his intentions. Here, for instance, is how she describes her meeting with him in the ten-minute place:

By now I was confused. Is it sister then? I was thinking. Have I got this wrong and all the time it’s been sister and not me he’s after? But why mention her ex-boyfriend? And why that bomb that killed him? And why maybe-boyfriend? Meanwhile, during all this puzzlement, those unpleasant waves, biological ripple upon unpleasant ripple, kept up assailment on my legs and backbone (110-11).

As middle sister realizes a few moments later, what milkman is doing here is implicitly threatening maybe-boyfriend by tying him to eldest sister’s murdered ex-boyfriend. Her physical response to these threats suggests that she grasps milkman’s meaning before she becomes consciously aware of it, which is significant in a novel where language is so often used to benefit those in power. Milkman may speak in a way designed to confuse and overwhelm, and middle sister may lack the words to express her situation clearly, but these anti-orgasms provide her with an instinctive understanding of the danger she’s in.