Not that Milkman is especially historical fiction, but like good historical fiction Milkman brings to live a different time and place which is different from, but still speaking to, the present-day. In this case that means #MeToo, and ongoing efforts to share stories and increase awareness of sexual harassment and sexual abuse: concepts unfamiliar to middle sister in Milkman. The implication of an entanglement is enough to make it fact in the court of public opinion.

Milkman knows that he has this power over middle sister knows that she has no power or agency of her own to refuse him. Yet it’s too late to be uninteresting, because even this passive non-action of middle sister’s, being spoken to by a dangerous man, has made her interesting, and soon enough the rumour mill has it that she and Milkman (married, don’t you know, and twenty-three years between them, so they say? the rumours go) are in a relationship. Not someone you want to get entangled with.

Milkman is not a real milkman – he’s an operative for the renouncers, one of those called criminal by the state police from the country over the water who does jobs better not spoken about in the open. Despite her efforts to remain as ordinary as possible, middle sister is powerless to protect herself when, one day while reading and walking, she is stopped by the Milkman and asked if she’d like to get in his van. Middle sister’s only oddity (which is, in this environment, a flaw) is that she reads while walking home from work, always nineteenth century novels ‘because I did not like the twentieth century’. She – like most of her community – keeps her head down and tries to stay out of others’ affairs as much as possible, for ‘to be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous’. Middle sister is a nondescript adolescent in 1970s Belfast. If she has a name for herself, she isn’t sharing it with us. She’s usually called middle sister, sometimes maybe-girlfriend once or twice she’s accused of being a double-cat. Milkman starts as a wry story of manipulation and cloistered living in a cloistered place – and then about halfway through Milkman opens up and reveals that it’s a lot more than that.įirst off, none of the characters in Milkman have names, and the narrator’s identity shifts depending on who is speaking to her. Complex, I guess, without being complicated. Milkman has all the hallmarks of what classics should be: clever, without being clever-clever it’s simple in its plot and premise but it doesn’t over-egg what’s going on or decide for you what to think about the characters or their predicaments.

The milkman book review