In late 1970s Northern Ireland, our narrator walks with her nose buried in a book. She does this a lot; she prefers the 19th century to distract herself from the issues that guide her life. One day, the milkman shows up. He knows a lot about her; what she knows about him is that he is an influential paramilitary, and it would not be wise to anger him. He makes it clear that bad things will befall her boyfriend if she continues to see him. Wherever she goes, she will meet him and his silent band of supporters. He stalks her and he will not rest until he has her. She doesn’t want him, but is unsure of how to proceed. Friends and family are unhelpful. Either the narrator should be happy to have him, or it’s all her fault for having an affair with a married man. The narrator is baffled, frustrated, but also quietly accepting of the oppressive society in which she lives. She understands a fair deal of the world around her, but not enough.
Milkman is a very strange novel and not at all what I expected. The narrative is non-linear, not exactly stream of consciousness but rambling, and the rambling is turned up when the narrator panics. It borrows heavily from the absurdism in the works of Beckett and Kafka; it reminded me, in particular, of The Trial, in which the protagonist battles bureaucracy. Here, it’s the unwritten rules of embattled Catholics in Belfast. There is our shop and their shop; tea of allegiance and traitor’s tea, the right butter and the wrong butter. Authorities are mistrusted, “the only time you’d call the police in my area would be when you were going to shoot them.” Hospitals, likewise, are to be avoided because turning up with certain injuries would lead to immediate arrest. Communal policing and kangaroo courts are the law of the land, and things such as evidence are replaced by hearsay and the belief that something is simply not as it ought to be.
There is also a lot of humour in it, particularly in the way in which the narrator describes the women of the era and area. There are the ‘holy women’* and the ‘issue women’. The former are the housewives of yore, deeply religious and the ones who quietly keep the system running, who allow the paramilitary organisations to thrive. The issue women are the ones who speak up in lieu of 1970s feminism. There are glimmers of hope, such as in the real milkman, who refuses to let paramilitary organisations bury weapons in his yard and who speaks up against the oppressive culture, thus becoming both a hero and a paria. Coincidentally, he seems to be the only person – male or female – who respects the narrator for who she is. It is also around him that the deeply weird but also funny and hopeful conclusion of the novel centers.
The novel is ostensibly about the Northern Irish civil war, but it could have been just as easily about any other oppressive era. It has the same wicked propensities as Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin, for example, or it might have been about the #MeToo controversies in the way in which people are quick to blame the narrator for having a stalker.
It’s not an easy read, and I wasn’t sure I was going to finish it until I did. It takes a bit of effort and an open mind, but in the end it is surprisingly delightful.
*my library only carried a translation of this title, so I translated some terms back to English and therefore, they may not line up with the terminology in the actual novel.