Every now and then I go on a ‘book browse and buy binge’, i.e. I go into a bookshop, browse all the sections, and choose an array of books in different genres, usually based solely on the interest sparked (in sequential order) by cover art, back cover synopsis, and my perusal of the first few pages.

Milkman is not one of those books. BUT it immediately predates such an expedition by being an airport book, purchased at the start of the journey that incorporated the ‘book browse and buy’ session, so I’m including it in the books I’ll be reporting back on, as a result of that process. And let’s face it, the Airport Read has to be another of the great book acquisition processes. (AR & BB&BB, just to go wild on acronyms.)

In terms of the book reports you can expect, last week’s post on Frankie McMillan’s My Mother and the Hungarians was the first of the BB&BB grab-bag.

Principle No 1 with this process is that ideally all the books should come from different genres or classes of literature. So My Mother and the Hungarians is a collection of flash fiction on broadly contemporary realist topics, whereas Milkman is a novel and a blend of recent historical and contemporary realist fiction. It’s set in the 1970s period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland—half a century ago now—but still close enough to us to seem as much contemporary as historical.

Milkman is also 2018’s Man Booker Prize winner, although I must confess I completely missed that sticker on the book cover: a classic example of hiding in plain sight, or reader’s myopia! But I did think the back cover synopsis sounded really interesting—and I was not wrong about that. Milkman is a really interesting story. It’s also a really tough read in many ways and one that requires concentration at times, so not necessarily one for the beach holiday or late at night when you’re tired. Warning: This book requires your full attention. (I do not, by the way, say that like it’s a bad thing.)

So what is it about, beyond the Troubles? That in itself is a challenging question because the book is about many things: the transition of a young woman from adolescence to adulthood amid family and (extreme) societal pressures; relationships, including dealing (or not dealing) with sexual predation; community tensions; and the overarching pressure of the Troubles which informs and shapes every aspect of life. So it’s not a book where it’s easy to glibly say, “Well, it’s about xyz…”

If pressed, though, I would say that this book is about a society under pressure and how that pressure pervades and distorts every aspect of individual, family, and community life.

Milkman is told entirely in first person point-of-view, but you never (I’m pretty sure)  know the name of the protagonist or many of those about her. This works in the context of the story but it’s also part of the reason the reader has to pay attention, because being stream of consciousness, the focus of the narrator’s perspective slides about a bit.

One of the thing’s that struck me about the book as well, is that the lens on people and events is frequently humorous. But that’s not at all the same thing as being comic, and very often the humor is downright dark or has dark overtones. What it does show, though, is how humor—dark, savage, wry—can be an important part of mental and emotional survival.

And it was only as I typed the word “survival” that I realised that is, of course, a really important element of what this book is about: personal survival and maintaining the bonds of personal relationship and community in the face of the extreme conditions cited above.

I think Milkman is a terrific, though challenging, read and I really recommend it. If you’ve enjoyed books like Kate Atkinson’s When Will There Be Good News? or Life After Life, Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, or Nadine Gordimer’s No Time Like The Present, I believe you may enjoy it, too.

As I’ve already indicated above, I purchased my copy of this book, which is the mass market paperback edition, 348 pp, published by Faber & Faber in 2018.