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Milkman is an absolutely wild ride in the way only a stream-of-consciousness narrated by a Northern Irish teen girl during the Troubles could be.
With long-winded paragraphs that refuse proper names but address the role of renouncers, dead cats, Catholicism, maybe-boyfriend's absentee ballroom-dancing parents, and the discomfort caused by a woman reading-while-walking, this story is honestly one of the most unique things I have ever read. The prose highlights the paranoia that underlies all social interactions in this politically fraught context. Layered on top of such a context is the overt story about our narrator's stalker, milkman, who is in fact not her only stalker but the one who appears more dangerous.
What Burns cleverly shows the reader is how government surveillance does not necessarily mean a society in which all citizens live in docile fear, but instead a society in which people are quick to police one another through informal means - violence, gossip, and ridicule.
With long-winded paragraphs that refuse proper names but address the role of renouncers, dead cats, Catholicism, maybe-boyfriend's absentee ballroom-dancing parents, and the discomfort caused by a woman reading-while-walking, this story is honestly one of the most unique things I have ever read. The prose highlights the paranoia that underlies all social interactions in this politically fraught context. Layered on top of such a context is the overt story about our narrator's stalker, milkman, who is in fact not her only stalker but the one who appears more dangerous.
What Burns cleverly shows the reader is how government surveillance does not necessarily mean a society in which all citizens live in docile fear, but instead a society in which people are quick to police one another through informal means - violence, gossip, and ridicule.