Whilst walking and reading Ivanhoe she is picked up by milkman/the milkman/Milkman, a paramilitary leader aged 41 and married. Our main protagonist (an 18 year old reader and walker – she reads while walking) lives in maybe-Belfast and this reading/walking behaviour is both absurd and unacceptable there.

There’s Sister, Ma and Da (but there are four sisters and four brothers, except that one of the brothers isn’t a real brother) and anyway one’s dead and one’s in hiding (over there or down there) – ‘cos he’s a Renouncer of the State. There’s Longest Friend, there’s Third Brother in Law, Little Sisters (three of them always referred to collectively, none has a solo voice).

There’s Tablets Girl – a poisoner, a witch maybe, a maddie for sure, a girl who was really a woman. We have Somebody McSomebody, Maybe Boyfreind, milkman (later Milkman, sometimes the milkman) and also, another, the real milkman. Neither are the names of any of the characters, bar one. Belfast (or at least Northern Ireland, so maybe-Belfast). A place emerging from civil war in the late 1970’s but still in the grip of terrorism. Long, often seemingly rambling, portraits of life in a place few of us know. If you’re looking for The Hardy Boys read The Hardy Boys. Magnus Mills’ The Scheme for Full Employment (a satirical take on Napoleonic economics).įor a start, to say it has a vague storytelling arc would be an understatement. I had another in mind when I was plotting this review as I lay in bed unable to sleep but it has slipped away from me now that I have pen in hand – it may come back to me. In many ways this novel is a farce.) Under Milkwood (crazy people, crazily told). Dario Fo (and his farcical political Italian landscapes. You just have to feel your way in, because this is no ordinary novel, with no ordinary language. That’s not to say that this remarkable novel is better as it ends than as it starts because you only have to reread the first five pages or so, having finished the 348th, to realise that what may have seemed unclear at first was anything but. Only four novels this century (that come to mind) struck me as viscerally as this has.ĭon’t get me wrong, the striking was a bit doingy at first but later became more focussed and resonant as the strikers took better aim and improved their accuracy. With her winning of The Booker Prize in 2018 my faith in this oft-tarnished medallion has been fully restored because this is a recognition that is truly deserved.

Milkman novel review