At a First Friday Club meeting this year at Writing NSW in Rozelle, one of the aspiring writers in the audience asked Angela Mayer, the speaker and a publisher, to give advice about submitting manuscripts.
Her response was: “It’s not so much a matter of beautiful writing. I look for narrative tension. The first pages need to make me want to turn the page, to read on and see what happens.”
I thought immediately of the novel I was reading at the time, Anna Burns’ Milkman, a book which won the Man Booker prize in 2018.
I took my time reading Milkman. It’s not that I didn’t care what would happen next. I did, desperately. This book is taut with narrative tension. I was reluctant to take it too fast partly because I dreaded finding out what was going to happen to the young Northern Irish woman entangled in the multi-layered politics of the Troubles.
The young woman has a peculiar innocence which makes you care about her. She stands apart from others in the way she observes and analyses the social behaviour of her fellow citizens, all of whom are under threat from multiple militias. She protects herself by reading 19thcentury books as she walks and taking night classes in French, seemingly innocent activities but in her time and place, they make her stand out as different and hence suspicious.
She is being stalked by a man known as Milkman. There is something very sinister about the way no-one has real names in this book. Characters are referred to as ‘maybe boyfriend’, ‘longest friend’, ‘wee sisters’, ‘second brother-in-law’, and ‘real milkman’.
Writing classes I have attended recommend the use of short sentences to build tension. Anna Burns uses this technique to great effect:
It’s disturbing. It’s deviant. It’s optical-illusional. Not public-spirited. Not self-preservation. Calls attention to itself and why – with enemies at the door, with the community under siege, with us all having to pull together – would anyone want to call attention to themselves here? (p. 200)
In Milkman, however, the opposite often happens. Tension builds from long sentences. The novel is told in first person and the heroine of the story often thinks in long sentences which turn back on themselves in repetition. These convoluted sentences mirror her thoughts as she grapples with the complexity of her situation. They can be chilling:
Instead the place was stuck in one long melancholic story to the extent that the truly shining person coming into this darkness ran the risk of not outliving it and, in some cases, ‒ if the person was viewed as intolerably extra-bright and extra-shiny ‒ it might even reach the point of that individual having to lose his or her physical life. (p. 90)
Digressions into remembered incidents and extended analysis of the society in which she lives also serve to delay the action and in so doing, ramp up fear about what will befall such an earnest and unspoiled soul. Anna Burns often uses long sentences to inject some light into the darkness through humour. This has the effect of raising the tension even further.
The other reason I read this book slowly was to savour the language. Anna Burns writes beautiful poetic sentences which I read and re-read for the sheer pleasure of their music and their insights. She plays with language, making up new words, to describe the feelings experienced by the protagonist. One of my favourites was this description of fear and dread:
First thing that happened was again I got those spine shivers, those scrabblings, the scuttlings, all that shuddery-shudderiness inside me from the bottom of my backbone right into my legs. (p. 102)
This is a book to keep you on the edge of your seat. It is best read in chunks to allow respite from the tension. Read it to the end to see how Anna Burns resolves the tension and for the sheer enjoyment of reading such beautiful language.
Title: Milkman
Author: Anna Burns
Paperback, 360 pages
Published by Faber, 2018
ISBN: 9780571338740 (paperback)
Winner Man Booker Prize 2018 UK