The strengths and weaknessess of Burns's Milkman

Anna Burns's Milkman (2018) is like no other novel I've come across, and to the extent that some of the key values of literary fiction are - access to the consciousness of another, originality ("make it new"), access to the experience of living in a time and place different from our own - Milkman is a classic and worthy of the accolades (Booker Prize) that have come its way. From the first page we experience the voice of this unnamed narrator and, over the course of the novel, though this was not clear at the outset, we come to understand the terror of living in a small community in a time of civil war and a police state (Northern Ireland ca 1970). We see how people abandon all hope for normal, healthy, loving relationships and we see the strange, sorrowful, even perverse ways in which people accommodate to the turmoil and danger of their lives: refusal to call anyone by his/her name, distrust of all social institutions (e.g., hospitals), inability or unwillingness to love anyone for fear of loss and death. That said, as some reviewers have noted, this is a difficult novel to read and possibly the most un-cinematic (make of that what you will) novels I've ever read. The conclusion provides a moment of optimism and the upbeat - the stalker Milkman is dead and the (unnamed) narrator resumes her running exercises with "third brother-in-law," but somehow this slightly hopeful ending feels tacked on and unearned: the world is still a shambles, danger is still everywhere, the narrator's "maybe boyfriend" has gone off with his male lover; the narrator's "first sister," who has barely had a presence in the novel, suddenly appears and tries to smooth things over w/ the family - this just feels like a quick effort to tidy up after a bloody riot. Oddly, the narrator gives almost no information about some key plot points, most notably the death of Milkman, who's just wiped off the board; that's what I mean by "un-cinematic": one would expect for, and hope for, the death of the antagonist to be treated directly, preferably by some action on the part of the narrator. Just wiping him off the slate just isn't enough of a payoff after we've grown to hate and fear him over hundreds of pages. Still, it's a novel like none other, one that demands a lot from readers but is one of the few that can truly transport you into the mind and tie and place of another.