However, paramilitary or state violence is not shown. There were ‘our shops’ and ‘their shops’.” Distrust of state forces is total: “The only time you’d call the police in my area would be if you were going to shoot them.” In its digressive, batty narrative voice, it resembles a novel cited by the narrator: Tristram Shandy. Also by the community, by the very mental atmosphere, that minutiae of invasion.”Īnna Burns, who was shortlisted for the Orange prize in 2002 with No Bones, which also depicted the Troubles, is excellent at evoking the strange ecosystem that emerges during protracted conflict – “this psycho-political atmosphere, with its rules of allegiance, of tribal identification”. “I’d been thwarted into a carefully constructed nothingness by that man. He works on her until he breaks her down. He makes it clear that he will kill the narrator’s boyfriend if she continues seeing him. A phalanx of silent men hover in his vicinity. I don’t think he was anybody’s.” Yet he is everywhere. “Having been brought up in a hair-trigger society where the ground rules were – if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack by something that wasn’t there?”Īs a character, the milkman is an immensely creepy invention. I did not like the milkman and had been frightened and confused by his pursuing and attempting an affair with me.”īecause of the milkman’s status and power within this embattled community, our narrator must endure his presence. “But I had not been having an affair with the milkman. It soon becomes common knowledge that she is having an affair with this older married man. “This would be a 19th-century book because I did not like the 20th century.” In so doing, she has marked herself as “beyond-the-pale” and attracted the unwanted sexual attention of a senior paramilitary figure, the milkman, who has marked her as his property. She keeps her head down, literally, by burying it in a book while she walks.

“T he 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,” begins this strange and intriguing novel that tackles the Northern Ireland conflict from the perspective of an 18-year-old girl with no interest in the Troubles.

Annaburns