Key plot developments near the end of Milkman, and Burns's strange narrative style

A few twists and surprises toward the end of Anna Burns's Booker-winning novel, Milkman - though one could hardly say that this is a plot-driven novel - as the eponymous Milkman, an IRA leader and a creepy guy who has been stalking and threatening the (unnamed) narrator, is killed, presumably by government troops/police in N Ireland, which of course lifts the burden that has been crushing the narrator from the outset. (Turns out, by the way, the Milkman is his actual name - which makes him, I think, the only truly named character in this novel.) In the process of getting to M, however, troops have killed or injured others - including, just to make things difficult, the "real milkman," so-called by the narrator because that's his actual profession. Narrator's mother, who is one of I think 18 women who swoon over the real milkman, is tending to him in the hospital - theirs seems to be a real and ongoing romantic relationship, perhaps the only one in this novel, part of whose theme is that everyone in this time and place deliberately avoids relationships and commitment so as not to be crushed by loss and sorrow when the partner, inevitably, is killed in the struggle. Meanwhile, the narrator pays an unannounced visit to home of "maybe boyfriend," and finds that the front door has been bashed in and the "MB" and his best friend, Chef, are in the kitchen doused in blood, with Chef attending to some kind of toxin tossed into MB's eyes. Narrator lurks in the background, unnoticed, and to her shock sees that Chef and Maybe Boyfriend are in love with each other and talking about leaving Ireland together. This twist was as much of a surprise to readers as the the narrator (perhaps Burns should have hinted at this outcome somewhere along the line?). So now the narrator is freed from her tormentor but alone and abandoned. There's nothing easy about this novel, and not much positive unless it's just the will to endure great hardships - obviously the narrator survives this long enough to look back on her early life and tell her story; as noted yesterday, the difficulty we encounter in reading this novel - the narrator's lack of obvious sequencing of events, oddity in dwelling on certain ordinary moments and encounters while quickly dispatching key plot moments, refusal to use any proper names (save Milkman) - mimics and re-creates the difficulty in living through these times of trouble.