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.

Going back to the "no names" thing. I think the reason this trick usually chafes me so bad is that — Saramago's Blindness for example — it's obviously a gimmick and/or an attempt to distract from those characters' lack of personality. But there are half a dozen characters in Milkman who ring extremely true. I guess names are no more necessary to characters in a novel than detailed physical descriptions.

I guess too there's still hope for literary fiction, hooray! Although Burns is 63. Feels like just a couple years ago this book won prizes, but it's seven.