By Cameron Woodhead
Milkman
Anna Burns
Milkman. By Anna Burns.
Faber & Faber, $29.99
This brilliant and unsettling novel from Irish author Anna Burns is a shaggy dog story – digressive, full of oddball incident and intellectual whimsy – set in Belfast during The Troubles. Its narrator, known only as middle sister, has just turned 18 and is the kind of dreamer who walks down the street with a thick Victorian novel in her hand. She has a sort-of boyfriend, but the figure who looms largest in her life is a creepy milkman – an older, married man, rumoured to be a paedophile, who's deeply enmeshed in simmering neighbourhood tribalism. When gossip about the narrator and the milkman surfaces, he invades her life with dire consequence. Milkman is compelling contemporary Irish fiction, canvassing dark material and difficult themes through a vivid, smart and loquacious narrative voice.