A couple of outstanding scenes highlighted this – the horrific slaughtering of the dogs and the canny banding together of the women who sat silently in front of a traitor’s house, pointing it out to those in charge. Instead, this ever-present, pervasive menace demonstrates how circumstances such as those during the Troubles, disrupt communities – you are left wondering who you can trust who is not towing the party-line who should be dobbed in. It was put about I had regular engagements with him, rendezvous, intimate ‘dot dot dots’ at various ‘dot dot dot’ places.Ī current of tension runs through the whole story and, in many ways, it’s a tension that is not fully realised with a single climactic moment. In fact, the milkman is stalking the narrator, and it is soon revealed that he is a paramilitary figure who holds great power in the community.Īs for the community, and my affair with the milkman according to this community, I was now well in it, that being the case whether I was or not.
Although the narrator is trying to distance herself from the turmoil that surrounds her, she is drawn in after being accused of having an affair with a married man known as ‘milkman’ (this is despite the narrator having a ‘maybe-boyfriend’). Burns’s unwavering and meticulous stream-of-consciousness account of the Troubles is told through the eyes of our unnamed narrator, an eighteen-year-old girl who comes from a large family impacted by political violence. I need a special rating for books that I’m glad I read but didn’t particularly enjoy.
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