by Anna Burns, 2018
Fantastic book! So original! Never read anything like this! LOVED it! Learned what Ireland in the 1970s was like – brought home the problems. Written from the perspective of an 18 year old Irish girl, Middle Sister. We never learn her first name. She has a wonderful relationship with maybe-boyfriend but everything goes sour when Milkman begins to stalk her. He’s a renouncer, a paramilitary activist, and he has his sights set on her. It ruins her life for 2 months. The community believes she is in love with him and has become a groupie. Rumors fly and she is afraid of him popping up so she stops seeing maybe-boyfriend, she stops reading-while-walking, she stops jogging, even with her third brother-in-law.
After a fight with maybe-boyfriend on the phone, she decides to go to maybe-boyfriend and discovers him in the kitchen with chef, his roommate, and he’s gay. They never see her there and she sneaks back out and on the way home, Milkman stops his white van and offers her a ride, she gets in against her own better judgment. He says he will pick her up the next night and to wear something feminine. The next night never comes because he is shot and killed. The shadow on her life lifts and she can start being herself again. Here are some passages from the book:
“I would have liked to have been a proper pairing and to have been officially dating and said so at one point to maybe-boyfriend, but he said no, that that wasn’t true, that I must have forgot and so he’d remind me. He said that once we tried-with him being my steady boy and me being his steady girl, with us meeting and arranging and seemingly moving, as did proper couples, towards some future end. He said I went peculiar. He said he also went peculiar, but that never had he seen me with so much fear in me before.”
“‘Running’!’ she grunted, and this sister was standing in her drainpipes and flip-flops with every toenail painted a different colour. This was before the years when people except in Ancient Egypt painted toenails different colours. She had a glass of Bushmills in one hand and a glass of Bacardi in the other because she was still at that stage of working out what to have for her first drink.”
“What I meant were my living options, for maybe-boyfriend had asked recently if I wanted to move in with him. At the time I had three objections as to why that might not be feasible. One was, I didn’t think ma could cope on her own with rearing wee sisters though I myself took no active role in the rearing of wee sisters. It just seemed I had to be there, on call, as some sort of background buffer to help prevent their precocity, their uncontained curiosity, their sense of readiness for anything spinning way out of control.”
“‘What is the provenance of the eeriness of the ten-minute area?’ I asked ma once. ‘You ask peculiar questions, daughter,’ ma replied. ‘Not as peculiar as those posed by wee sisters,’ I said, ‘and you answer them as if they were normal questions,’ meaning their latest at breakfast. ‘Mammy,’ they’d said, ‘mought it happen that if you were a female and excessively sporty and this thing called menstruation stopped inside you because you were excessively sporty’–wee sisters had recently discovered menstruation in a book, not yet through personal experience–’then you stopped being excessively sporty and your menstruation returned, would that mean you’d have extra time of menstruation to make up for the gap of not having had it when you should have had it only you couldn’t because your sportiness was blocking the production of your follicle-stimulating hormone, also blocking your luteinising hormone from instructing your oestrogen to stimulate the uterine lining in expectation of an egg to be fertilised with the subsequent insufficiency of hormones and oestrogen preventing the release of the egg to be fertilised or–should the egg be released but not fertilised–to the degeneration of the corpus luteum and the shedding of the endometrium or, mammy, would your menstruation stop at the time it was biologically programmed to stop regardless of the months or years of excessive sportiness when your menses didn’t come?’”
“She meant depressions, for da had had them: big, massive, scudding, whopping, black-cloud, infectious, crow, raven, jackdaw, coffin-upon-coffin, catacomb-upon-catacomb, skeletons-upon-skulls-upon-bones crawling along the ground to the grave type of depressions.”
“And that was the trouble with the shiny people. Take a whole group of individuals who weren’t shiny, maybe a whole community, a whole nation, or maybe just a statelet immersed long-term on the physical and energetic planes in the dark mental energies; conditioned too through years of personal and communal suffering, personal and communal history, to be overladen with heaviness and grief and fear and anger–well, these people could not, not at the drop of a hat, be open to any bright shining button of a person stepping into their environment and shining upon them just like that.”
“And, if you’re already out there on the street which is the battlefield which is the street when you hear that sudden barking, well, simply you listen and determine by its direction which way those soldiers are heading and, should they be heading your way, easily then, to nip down a sideway into another, less-exposing street. But they killed the dogs, taking out the middlemen, and so, until such times as new dogs were to be born and bred and schooled in partisanship in our area, it appeared we were back to that close-up, face-to-face, early ancient hatred.”
“And although wee sisters hadn’t shown any inordinate interest in our political problems–not any more that is, than their interest in phonological places of articulation, or Early Kingdom Egyptology, or the finer points of technical singing, or the state of the universe before it was reduced to order, or the Apotheosis of Heracles, or indeed any of their other many indices and appendices and marginalia and small notes at backs of books and all the rest of it–there was time a while back when me and the older sisters came in the door and found wee sisters reading the papers from ‘over there’.”
“She broke off from her talk about her sister’s great terror, which had been mistaken for her sister’s great anger, and she started, then cried out, ‘Who’s that? Who’s there? Who is that?’, her voice urgent and demanding, yet also excited, hopeful, because she knew before I did who was standing behind me; knew even before brother said, ‘Step aside, twin sister, I’m coming through.’”
“After completing the Jean Paul Gaultier kiss, and oblivious still of us, the audience, third brother swept his true wife off her feet and up into his arms. He said one word, ‘Hospital!’, then, switching from earlier declarations of love and self-idiocy to ‘urgent need of medical care and attention,’ he turned and carried his love to his car.”
“I gave it to them and they ate up, then rushed out to play the international couple. Looking out the window on my way upstairs to change for running, I could see this international couple had really taken off. Little girls were falling over everywhere. It seemed the whole district of them was out, playing, flouncing, and at first glance they appeared mainly to resemble chandeliers with added lusciousness such as golden brocade and embossed wallpaper. By the time I did go out, all the streets were overrun with them: beribboned, besilked, bevelveted, behighheeled, bescratchy-petticoated and in pairs or else alone but pretending to be in pairs, waltzing and periodically crashing over.”
Last 2 sentences of this marvelous book:
“As we jumped the tiny hedge because we couldn’t be bothered with the tiny gate to set off on our running, I inhaled the early evening light and realised this was softening, what others might term a little softening. Then, landing on the pavement in the direction of the parks & reservoirs, I exhaled this light and for a moment, just a moment, I almost nearly laughed.”
What an incredible book! Really original and took me to 1970s Ireland through the eyes of an 18-year old Irish girl with whom I fell in love – with her and her wee sisters and her ma and her third brother-in-law and real milkman and tablets girl’s sister, and maybe boyfriend who became ex-maybe-boyfriend. Beautiful, funny, engrossing! It won the Man Booker Prize and I’m not sure what that is but I think I want to read every Man Booker Prize winner because this one is one of the best books I’ve ever read.