Though the short chapters, which cover a long scope of years, might make the reader lose energy in places, suffering a constant barrage, they are effective in their totality.Īlthough this second novel continues Burns's interest in violence, and in retribution, it is not a historical novel in the same sense as No Bones. Her prose is brilliant, shocking and utterly relentless.
Her conjuring of school scenes, of family arguments, of random acts of violence, is by turns tender and painful. There is, too, something of the novels of Samuel Beckett in Burns’s keen eye for absurdity and tragicomedy amid an increasingly bleak landscape. If the scenes are occasionally cartoonish, or grotesque, Burns often manages to rein them in with moments of carefully observed humanity. But it is also a world of pranks, banter and intimacy. This is a world full of dead bodies, of children selling rubber bullets back to soldiers, teenagers writing poems in school full of female torsos floating in rivers, women being beaten, where a miscarried baby is carried in its amniotic sack by a confused and grieving mother and Amelia descends into anorexia and psychosis.
And seven whole days later, for Amelia was counting, she could hardly believe it, for here they were, still going on." Dead bodies All the girls in the novel want is for the violence, a source of curiosity at first, and then a pervasive and insidious bleakness, to end. Each of its chapters set in a different year of the Troubles, and time is a constant antagonist. At the beginning, Burns introduces a tragic irony that pervades the novel, a Bildungsroman. Amelia Lovett and her schoolfriends await the end of the Troubles, hoping for reconciliation, for normalcy. No Bones was highly acclaimed on its release, becoming a finalist for the Orange Prize and winning the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and it is certainly worth some renewed attention, not only for the ways in which it dialogues with Milkman but for its own merits, too.
With over a decade between her second novel and Milkman, there has been an inevitable maturing in Burns's style, though these first two novels are bold, terrifying, funny and profound, and it is a blessing that they will now be brought back into the public eye. After the success of Milkman, Anna Burns's so-called difficult (yet best-selling) Booker winner, her first two novels, No Bones (2001) and Little Constructions (2007) have been reissued.
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