Anna Burns

A long section that ends at about the 2/3 mark in Anna Burns's Milkman concludes w a meeting at a popular bar/club at which the best childhood friend of the unnamed narrator gives her a talking-to and a warning, telling her to be more conventional and not to draw attention to herself particularly regarding her propensity for walking around town while reading. This warning disturbs the narrator, who feels encroached upon from all sides, victimized, and misunderstood- in particular re her relationship w the eponymous Milkman, an IRA leader who has been stalking her and threatening her. It's widely believed that she is having a live/sexual relationship w him, which she emphatically is not - but she has little credibility, in part because of her odd behavior. Best Friend's advice is actually pretty good, tho narrator is too far gone to pay it heed. We have a sense at times that she is the only sane one in this world gone wrong, in which lives are cut short (Burns ends this section w a real kicker on this point, which I won't divulge), people are spied on and surreptitiously photographed by various forces: the government, the British army, The IRA, maybe others - it's a Kafka-esque world that seems like a nightmare or fantasy except that we know it's a depiction of a horrible time and place, quite accurate and credible if not on the specific details the without doubt on the feelings and fears. No one better than Burns has captured and depicted what it must have felt like to try to live a normal life in those times - the sense of an insular and smothering community, where as people go about their daily lives and chores and professions violent death is ever-present, so much as to go unremarked - and all for what? There's not a moment of discussion of politics or values anywhere in this novel - the antagonism between the two (or 3?) sides is just a state of mind, never discussed or explained - no peacemakers, no analysis or analysts, just a condition of ever-present danger.

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