This is a society in which reading a 19th-century novel is seen as more subversive than carrying a gun, and in which your forename or choice of vocabulary instantly marks you out as coming from “over the road”, “over the border” or even “over the water”. Where Milkman succeeds especially well is in summoning up, in a manner entirely free from cliche, what the novel itself calls the “psycho-political atmosphere” of its setting – an unnamed town in Northern Ireland in the 1970s that is split down sectarian lines, runs on its own skewed and corrupted structures of power, and has its own tightly controlled conventions and rules. (“Milkman” is the nickname of the man obsessed by the narrator – no deliverer of milk he, but a dangerous paramilitary.) The book is lent a kind of mythic authority by its insistence on naming its characters not as themselves but only for how they figure – as “middle daughter”, “first brother-in-law” or “maybe-boyfriend” – in a claustrophobic, inescapable tangle of relationships. It has very long paragraphs, an extremely distinctive and original narrative voice, and its characters are not given names, but rather known by descriptions. Milkman has been called “experimental”, but its occasional departures from novelistic convention hardly qualify it for that label. Alongside its urgency and anger, it is also very, very funny, shot through with a biting, sometimes rather batty, wit that lets light filter into its otherwise dark matter. But it is engrossing, a book that engulfs you and keeps you held and mesmerised. It is true that Milkman is not exactly a walk in the park – its scenery is too wild and intense for that. Be reassured: reading Milkman is absolutely nothing like taking a walk up Snowdon – a feat of endurance for which, I gather, a torch, compass and a first-aid kit are recommended. But potential readers, politicians or not, would do well to ignore the somewhat off-putting remarks made by the chair of the judges, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who, commenting on whether it was a “difficult” novel, compared the experience of reading it to taking “a walk up Snowdon”. All of which might make Milkman sound rather worthy.
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