Last night was Booker night. We watched the highly enjoyable BBC Four documentary celebrating fifty years of the Booker before segueing more or less immediately to the announcement of the 2018 prize itself. When Anna Burns’s name was read out for Milkman, I found myself overcome with emotion in a way that has not happened to me during the thirty-five years I have taken an interest in the prize. I started reading Milkman at the end of last week. When people asked me what I thought of it, I had replied ‘I think it’s brilliant, but there’s no way the judges are going to let it win – it’s too experimental’. Rarely have I been over-the-moon happier to be proven wrong.
Milkman was the novel on the Booker shortlist that no one was talking about. In almost every online discussion of this year’s Booker, Burns’s was the book that was seen as an also-ran, almost an irrelevance in the betting stakes, actual or theoretical, that always accompany this most visibly contentious of UK book prizes. In those moments where it has been discussed, commentators have reached invariably and somewhat lazily for the adjective ‘Joyceian’,, yet MIlkman is not Joyceian in any truly comparable sense. Burns’s use of language is less joyous stream of consciousness than careful construction, a coded letter home from dystopia, an eloquently guarded articulation of the unsayable.
Nor is Milkman just – simply, dismissably – ‘about the Troubles’, though particularly in these farcical weeks and months of Brexit insanity there are many – way too many – who would do well to think more about the Troubles than they apparently are doing. Milkman explores the ways in which not just armed paramilitaries but common or garden bullies, the bigot next door, can and will thrive during those times when democracy is in abeyance. It speaks eloquently to #MeToo, yes, but also to the way in which all minorities are sidelined, silenced and abused while those not directly affected turn a blind eye. It speaks, even, of what it is like to yearn for higher expression, to yearn to read books in a place and time where that activity is seen as somehow suspect – isn’t it always? – and to have that yearning twisted dangerously against you.
Most of all, Milkman is conspicuously, triumphantly, the work of a writer in mid-career, a writer who spends her days doing what she does, committed to what she does regardless of fashion or favour, regardless of what is going on out in the literary establishment. She clearly never saw Milkman as her ‘breakthrough’ – it was just her next novel.
This year’s Booker judges have been similarly committed, and courageous, right from the beginning. The longlist this year was outstanding, and the shortlist – unlike so many – did not contain one stick of dead wood. As I’m sure must be the ideal of every judging panel, any of the six books they chose had behind it a solid argument for its being the winner. That the judges carried the courage of their convictions right through to this most fitting of conclusions is not just unexpected, it is an affirmation of what literature – and the Booker Prize – should be about. What greater proof of this could there be than what Val McDermid said about her experience of being on the jury:
‘It has provoked a restlessness in me. I am thinking about how I can push my own writing in different directions and not do the same things again and again and again. If you’re a writer, everything you read gives you pause: You’re always looking for something you can steal or something you want to avoid. This has really taken me outside the usual tramlines of what I read.’
In the words of this year’s Booker chair of judges, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Milkman ‘is enormously rewarding if you persist with it. Because of the flow of the language and the fact some of the language is unfamiliar, it is not a light read [but] I think it is going to last’.
I think it is going to last. This should surely be the statement against which all potential Booker winners should be tested. Congratulations to Anna Burns, and well done those judges.