Burns's bizarre, lunatic prose and bizarre, arguably (depending on your point of view) lunatic narrator are ideally adapted for writing about a bizarre, lunatic world — IRA turf in 70's Belfast. Novels that withhold names from their characters invariably boil my piss, but I think it works here, in a place where names, like what kind of butter you get or TV show you watch or hobbies you have, come coated in layers of perverse, indelible, sectarian significance. If the loopings and tic-like repetitions of Middle Sister's voice are frustrating to read, they're also strangely lifelike as well as evoking the everyday frustrations of the setting, and of the narrator's futile efforts to assert control over her own narrative, or at least to ignore the false narrative being erected around her. I like how the first-person voice intrudes into reported speech, littering it with dusty old book words Middle Sis has picked up in her pre-20th century perusals. There are also two or three strands of humour running through the book (the narrator's irony, the farce of the community goings-on, the cast of crackpots), which I think is necessary/inevitable but could easily have fallen flat.