It took me about 50 pages to get into this one – it’s obviously really well-written, but it’s so dense and recursive that it took me a while to find my way into the story. Set in Northern Ireland during what’s probably the 1970s, Milkman is a dense stream of consciousness from our main character, who is never named. Almost every character is unnamed, instead being referred to by their relationship to others (our narrator calls herself middle sister; her mother calls her daughter; her almost-boyfriend calls her almost girlfriend) or a title (the titular milkman, although he’s not a actually milkman).
Middle sister is a teenage girl and although several members of her family have been involved with the IRA, she herself is no one in particular. This changes suddenly when the milkman, a 40-year-old paramilitary operative, decides that she’s his girl now. The milkman’s pursuit of middle sister is the queasy focus of the story. His faux-affability doesn’t mask his sense of entitlement at all, and middle sister very quickly realises that he’s going to do anything to get his way.
At times, the story almost seems to avoid the main plot – we loop back and around what’s happened a lot, fleshing out the relatively slight story with an incredible sense of atmosphere. The tense and divided world of Northern Ireland during the troubles is vivid, where even innocuous actions can be seen as a declaration of loyalty or betrayal.
By the end of it I was all in on this novel. I definitely think I’d like to reread this one.
