“At eighteen,” she says, “I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment. (“I did not like twentieth-century books, because I did not like the twentieth century,” she explains, not unreasonably.) Out of nowhere, like a human malediction, appears a paramilitary potentate known only as “the milkman,” who, though he is married and twice her age, takes a sexual interest in her that is both strangely indirect-he neither touches her nor looks directly at her while addressing her-and oppressively all-consuming. The 18-year-old narrator is marked out in her community as an eccentric for her habit of walking everywhere with her face hidden in the pages of 19 th-century novels. And depersonalization is central to its plot-though really it’s less a plot than a setup whose foundations are obsessively deepened over the course of about 370 pages-which concerns a particularly insidious and creepy campaign of sexual harassment and its disastrous ramifications. Milkman deals in industrial-strength estrangement and depersonalization. Neither are there any references to the Republic of Ireland or the occupying power of Britain there are only the countries “over the border” and “over the water.”īut in telling her story without names, Burns’ narrator heightens, rather than defuses, this violent political charge, and deepens the oppressive interiority of her narrative.

And although the book’s setting is clearly Northern Ireland in the 1970s, in a city that is probably but by no means unambiguously Belfast, the names of places (neighborhoods, streets, landmarks) are similarly withheld.

Nobody in these pages gets a name: Her siblings are “first sister,” “second sister,” “third brother” her love interest is “maybe-boyfriend,” while he refers to her as “maybe-girlfriend” her best friend is “longest friend from primary school,” and so on. From the opening sentence-“The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died”-Burns’ narrator, herself unnamed, signals her obstinate refusal of proper nouns. The foregoing is as irreducibly Irish as it is absurd, but I begin with it for the reason that this politicized business of names turns out to be central to Milkman itself.

Anna burns books