And that’s a different kind of strength, matriarchal but not really. The ‘traditional women’ are quite strong…Ĭ: Yeah, and because the characters in the book don’t go to the hospital because if you go then you might get made to be an informer for the state, or people will think you have done anyway so you just don’t go to the hospital, all these ‘traditional women’ do their own medical interventions into things. I thought the ‘issue women’ were funny and also the ‘traditional women’ and how they were all on the same side really but there was a conflict between them. Also, one of the things I liked about it is that it’s really, really funny. And even the stuff like when there’s a tender queer moment between two characters.
Nobody quite knows what’s going on because you can’t be out in the open. I agree with you that not naming the characters and place adds to the element of subterfuge and murkiness. She’s being watched all the time because of the place where she is and also she’s being policed because she’s a young woman. She doesn’t have the power to speak.Ĭ: It’s like she’s almost frozen because to do anything would encourage suspicion so she can’t do anything. She even gets to the point where she won’t speak to people and you feel frustrated reading it because basically everyone has an assumption about her, which is not true, but she thinks if she says that it’s not true that it will seem even truer, so she doesn’t say anything at all.
So there are layers of euphemisms which I thought was really good because it is the idea of it being so taboo that people don’t have the language to articulate what’s going on and I think that contributes to the sense of it being a stifling atmosphere. The first-person narrative is a chronicle of a tight-knit community in turbulent and often frightening times – managing to tell its story without ever naming the characters, the city or even the country where the action takes place, leaving the reader to unfold layers of ambiguity.įeminist Library volunteer Anna Pigott and London-based writer Catherine Madden shared some of their impressions of the book.Ĭ: What were your initial impressions of Milkman?Ī: A huge thing for me which I really loved and thought was amazing was that they don’t name the place they’re in.Ī: And they use euphemisms for everything.Ī: ‘That country over there.’ and they say ‘renouncers of the state’ instead of IRA. Anna Burns was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2018 for her novel Milkman, which focuses on the experiences of a teenage girl in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.
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