2025 Reading Challenge 39 Milkman
I picked up Milkman, laughably because I thought it was a science fiction book, and I thought, ‘That’s interesting, a sci-fi novel that is also a Booker prize winner.’ Idiot.
Anna Burns’s Milkman is set in an unnamed city during a period of political unrest that is clearly Belfast in the Troubles. The narrator, ‘middle sister’, tries to stay unnoticed while a figure known only as Milkman, a paramilitary man with local influence, begins to follow her.
The novel’s style is unusual. Paragraphs run long, characters are referred to by roles rather than names (‘maybe-boyfriend’, ‘third brother-in-law’), and dialogue blends into narration. Readers who prefer a clean structure may find it challenging. Yet this anonymity fits the world: one where names are dangerous, surveillance is constant, and clarity is suspect.
Burns’s humour is dry, often buried in the text and easy to miss. It cuts through the tension without softening it. The social environment she builds is small, inward-looking, ruled by rumour and threat, but it is also convincing and precise. There are no sweeping emotional crescendos; the dread is steady, quiet, and matter-of-fact.
Milkman is not a conventional thriller nor a romantic drama. It is a portrait of how control works in a closed society: through gossip, fear, and the slow erosion of private life. The writing demands patience but rewards it with an exact, unsentimental look at power and conformity.
It is not light reading and never tries to be; it took me a few days to get into the prose style, and I’m not sure it’s a style I’d like to continuously face. But it is a distinctive, unsettling, and sharply observed novel that stays with you less because it charms than because it refuses to.
Not science fiction. Just ordinary life made strange enough to feel like it.
I gave this book 7.6 out of 10.
TTRPG Thoughts:
The use of Burns to name characters by their role, rather than by a name, immediately smacks of Powered by the Apocalypse and Playbooks. I wonder if you expanded this, so there are no names, it is all role or archetype, that it would change players’ behaviours.
Perhaps this kind of set-up would encourage players to discover or invent personality through play rather than front-loading it with a backstory.
Following on from this, I think Paranoia or Paul Baldowski’s Genre Setup for Sanction, Lost in the Fold would be good experiments to trial this impersonal style of game, e.g. Function over Flesh!