A twist in the plot of Anna Burns's Milkman

The strange narrative of Anna Burns's Milkman (2018) continues to unfold - or perhaps to fold in upon itself - as the (unnamed) narrator has her 3rd confrontation w/ the eponymous stalker; we learn by this point, about halfway through then novel (which consists of several extremely long chapters w/out a break) that she is terrified of the Milkman, who seems to be spying on her and confronts her unexpectedly at various moments in her life, but on the other hand her mother (and perhaps the community at large) suspects that she's having an affair with Milkman and warns her against this entanglement. At the 3rd confrontation we confront a new possibility: Milkman seems to be one of the "renouncers," which is code in this novel for members of the IRA (the resistance would be a more typical term), and he warns her about car bombs and in particular about the man she calls her "maybe boyfriend," who is fixated on car parts and car repair; it's possible that Milkman is providing her w/ a friendly if oblique warning, rather than a threat. The novel continues w/ its extremely odd and ominous tone; though the setting is obvious to all readers, Burns gives out almost all info on the setting and the characters in a kind of code. She never says "Ireland" or "the Troubles," but refers to "the Sorrows," "over thew water" (i.e., the UK), "over the road" (i.e., Ireland), the renouncers (see above), and other cryptic terminology. But there's no mistaking that this novel gives us the fear and feeling of young people trying to live a life while they recognize that they are under constant surveillance, that the slightest mis-step or tongue-slip could lead to ostracism or assassination, that they must live in constant fear of violence and death. Some of the great scenes in the middle section of this novel are the incident in which the forces from "over the water" slaughter all of the dogs in the community and place the dead bodies in a huge pile; the casual, off-hand way in which the narrator informs us that two of her siblings have been killed in the struggles; the death of the young man obssessed w/ potential nuclear war between the US and USSR.