5 — Thursday, January 17, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Shortlisted Man Booker Prize novels are enthralling

“Everything 
Under,” 
Daisy 
Johnson’s 
2018 
Man 
Booker 
prize-shortlisted 
novel 
that 
relocates 
Sophocles’s 
“Oedipus 
Rex” to modern-day England and 
reinterprets the story through what 
some may call a feminist lens, has 
been praised for its daring alone. 
Well, here’s that pat on the back.
Now, on to evaluating Johnson’s 
story itself — or, the point at 
which praise for Johnson ceases. 
Instead of mining the depths of a 
classic like “Oedipus” in pursuit of 
contemporary insights, Johnson 
opts to skim the story for its most 
base content — the fated patricide 
and incest — and exploits their 
sensationalism. 
Johnson 
makes 
the most of what she’s skimmed, 
smearing it into the likeness of a 
novel. Yet all that offers her audience 
in terms of a reading experience 
is the sensation of being dragged 
through the muck.
Still, the opening chapters of 
“Everything Under” will beguile, 
like an off-key siren song. Gretel, 
the main character who arguably 
did not deserve to be (more on 
that later), narrates in relentless 
second person, employs a relentless 
active voice and harnesses a tone of 
relentless accusation. The addressee 
of the second person narration 
and the tireless accusations is 
Gretel’s mother, who raised Gretel 
in poverty on a canal boat only 
to leave her daughter when she 
turned 16. Two-thirds of Johnson’s 
parallel sequences in “Everything 
Under” slogs through this fraught 
relationship: 
one 
chronicling 

Gretel’s search for her mother and 
the other capturing their continued 
dysfunctionality even after Gretel 
finds her.
For a short while, Johnson’s 
narrative 
techniques 
work, 
ensnaring readers in the anxiety, 
apprehension and resentment Gretel 
has felt since being abandoned. 
Soon enough, however, the sharp 
edge of Gretel’s narration dulls with 
overuse. What once read as rhythm 
now induces the flat, chronic pain of 
a headache. And once the headache 
sets 
in, 
Johnson’s 
borrowed, 
unremarkable observations (e.g. 
“Children are supposed to leave 
their parents … Parents are not 
supposed to leave their children”), 
for all their writerly flair, lose their 

disguise and their charm.
Midway through the novel, 
another story — that of Margot, 
Oedipus’s counterpart — takes 
over. 
Anesthetized 
by 
Gretel’s 
redundancy, not to mention the 
unwavering wretchedness of most 
every other character (especially 
Gretel’s mother) up to this point, 
readers may mistake this shift in 
favor of multidimensional character 
Margot for a breakthrough. Of 
course, it cannot last. Gretel has 
commandeered this story from the 

beginning, and it’s too late for a coup. 
This internal battle for control of 
the story and its unfavorable result 
illustrates the broader identity crisis 
stifling “Everything Under.”
One of Johnson’s tasks as the 
re-interpreter of a classic is to 
supply readers with a useful lens 
through 
which 
to 
re-examine 
the original story, one that offers 
new insights. It might be useful to 
imagine the re-interpreter as the 
optometrist and their readers the 
patients seated before the many 
lenses of the phoropter. It is the 
author’s job, in this instance, to help 
their reader see something new and 
see it clearly, which is why Margot’s 
arc stands out. In Margot’s story, 
Johnson 
reevaluates 
“Oedipus” 
through the lens of gender, and 
readers have a fresh encounter 
with the malleability of gender: 
Specifically, the ways gender can be 
weaponized, both in one’s favor and 
to one’s detriment. For the rest of 
the novel, Johnson struggles to pick 
an equally apt lens (motherhood, 
family and fate are attempted), and 
the dizzying confusion of lenses 
makes it nearly impossible to see 
anything else valuable in Johnson’s 
reinterpretation, compounding the 
reader’s headache.
A 
prominent 
innovation 
in 
Johnson’s retelling of “Oedipus,” 
likely spawned by her reliance on 
bewildering her audience in order to 
maintain their attention, is the canal 
thief. Or, as Gretel and her mother 
call it, the “Bonak”: a menacing, 
elusive beast that stalks, steals and 
commits murder along the canal on 
which they lived. 

When 
I’m 
asked 
about 
“Milkman,” what usually comes 
first is a facial expression. It’s 
unconscious, I think, involving 
a fusion of shock and delight 
— a raising of the eyebrows, an 
open mouth, a slight grin — and 
holding for only a brief moment 
before I get to a synopsis of the 
book that ends with an aggressive 
recommendation. 
For 
good 
reason, too: Irish author Anna 
Burns’s 2018 novel is increasingly 
popular. The novel beat out other 
favorites for the 2018 Man Booker 
Prize and has soared in sales in 
recent months.
These 
accomplishments 
of 
Burns’s are rightfully harvested. 
“Milkman” is, quite simply, an 
arresting masterpiece. Telling the 
story of a young woman planted in 
late-twentieth-century Northern 
Ireland, “Milkman” is a chilling 
story that Burns uses — both 
outstandingly successfully and 
covertly — as a lens to apply to 
the world readers interact with 
in “Milkman.” With prose so 
reliably detailed and engrossing 
and 
an 
audacious, 
yet 
still 
intricate, cast of characters, it is no 
question the Booker Prize fell into 
commendable hands.
It takes only a page or two of 
reading to realize that the cover 
of “Milkman” is deceptive. The 
binding of the 2018 winner of 
the Man Booker Prize depicts 

an innocuous, fluorescent-pink 
sunset — one of those once a year, 
stop-and-snap-a-photo 
sunsets 
that makes “Milkman” stands out 
among its fellow books.
The 
sedative 
lightness 
of the cover seems to admit 
innocuousness. But “Milkman” 
is not innocuous. Nor is it gentle, 
or quiet, or apologetic — nothing 
that the cover may suggest about 
a subdued, romantic narrative. 
To say I wasn’t excited to read 
the Booker winner would be a 
lie — based on the superficiality 
of covers and excerpts, I have 
rooted for “Milkman” since its 
nomination on the long-list — 
but 
the 
way 
I fell in love 
with 
reading 
“Milkman” 
was 
not 
in 
the 
pleasant, 
blushing manner 
I had expected. 
It was a cycle of 
shock, recoil and 
return.
Anna 
Burns’s 
third 
novel 
narrates the story of an 18-year-
old girl (referred to as “Middle 
Sister,” as none of the characters in 
“Milkman” are prescribed actual 
names) over the course of two 
months. Her unnamed town is 
saturated with violence — violence 
from the ubiquitously demonized 
enemy countries “over the water,” 
violence from the renouncers 
of the state that control Middle 
Sister’s 
town 
and 
violence 
from the state police as they 

intervene in a village of scattered 
revolutionaries. 
Surprisingly, 
though, this war-zone setting is 
but an offhand normality in the 
book. Instead, it is Milkman, a 
paramilitary that begins making 
unwarranted advances on Middle 
Sister, that takes the place of chief 
antagonist in the book.
At first glance, Burns lays out an 
invidious landscape that seems to 
hyperbolize the dark experience 
of growing up as a woman in the 
late 20th century. Maybe, Burns 
seems to suggest, the descent of 
society would look like this for all 
genders. But on second thought, 
the landscape Middle Sister walks 
— and how her 
hyperaware, 
rightfully-
paranoid 
thoughts congeal 
in it — becomes 
painfully 
real. 
Middle 
Sister’s 
encounters 
with 
Milkman 
while walking, her fears of being 
drugged, the pernicious comments 
coming from third brother-in-law, 
all resonate uncomfortably with 
the realties meeting women today.
This daring, critical kick at that 
experience of being a woman pays 
off. The apotheosis of the book’s 
dark and applicable portrayals 
is perhaps Tablets Girl, a “girl 
who was actually a woman,” that 
is one of the local outcasts in 
Middle Sister’s town due to her 
propensity to poison people. This 
usually takes place, most suitably 

and without retribution, in bars. 
People flee from Tablets Girl, 
people watch their drinks when 
Tablets Girl is around. It’s not 
just Burns’s clear allusion to date-
rape that that is to be appreciated 
here, but her spiked humor and 
exaggeration also.
This is not to reduce “Milkman” 
down to a forced, constricted 
focus 
on 
gender-politics 
though. Burns’s writing alone is 
remarkable (something I refuse 
to say passively). “Milkman” is 
brimming with endlessly long 
paragraphs, 
lose-your-train-
of-thought stretched sentences 
and digressing thoughts from 
Middle Sister that render the 
book 
incredibly 
complex. 
At 
first, I was perturbed by this 
formal and royal-esque writing, 
especially upon an encounter with 
a paragraph spanning four, almost 
five, pages. But as I continued, 
I found myself — in an unlikely 
way — reading Middle Sister’s 
voice in an uninterrupted pattern 
even more critical and translucent 
than I expected possible. This is 
assisted by Burns’s near-perfect 
draw of synonyms through the 
book, making her writing appear 
dependably careful and personal.
I 
was 
enamored 
by 
the 
characters in “Milkman” and the 
abrasive humor that was tacked 
onto them. It isn’t often that I get 
a full cast of characters (narrator, 
antagonist, family) that are so real, 
so exciting to encounter. Most 
memorable are the “wee sisters,” 
Middle Sister’s three younger 
sisters who, despite their young 
ages, are infatuated with topics 
such as French revolutionaries, 
going through “Kafka phases” and 
eavesdropping every moment they 
get. Characters like the wee sisters 
offer 
unexpected 
gratification 
along Burns’s dark timeline of 
events. The real humor displayed 
make “Milkman” all the more 
authentic and pleasurable.
I love “Milkman” because it is a 
fruitful attempt to offer me hints 
of a human experience I will never 
be able to understand, let alone 
be familiar with. Perhaps the 
most evocative and vivid account 
in the vein of social-rebellion 
and unwanted-gaze I have ever 
encountered, “Milkman” is a 
narrative that has been told 
repeatedly, even frequently in the 
21st century. Burns’s unequivocal 
writing turns this narrative into 
a fearsome chant, one well worth 
shouting along to.

The Man Booker Prize is 
about as coy and mysterious as 
the work it honors. The award 
was inaugurated in the UK 
in 1969 according to “just one 
criterion — the prize would 
be for ‘the best novel in the 
opinion of the judges’,” which 
you may recognize as the literal 
definition of “book award.” 
If you go to the Booker Prize 
Foundation for something more 
specific, you’ll learn that the 
aim of the prize is to “increase 
the reading of quality fiction” 
and 
“attract 
the 
intelligent 
general 
audience,” 
some 
very 
conventional, 
slightly 
pretentious 
ambitions. 
And 
then, somewhere along the line, 
the prize is casually promised 
to “transform the winner’s 
career.”
From 
a 
cynical 
eye, 
everything about this begs to 
be grilled: the near-satirical 
ambiguity, the slight air of 
superiority — all of it. The 
thing about the Man Booker, 
though, is that they pull it 
off, 
resoundingly. 
Although 
absent from their bare mission 
statement, the Man Booker does 
an excellent job of sniffing out 
innovative fictions: prose that’s 
perhaps a touch too edgy to sell 
in the mainstream and may 
just need a little £50,000 kiss 
for momentum. Consequently, 
the program has created and 
maintained 
an 
impressive 

cohort 
of 
now-household 
names in the world of literary 
fiction, absolute Gs like Salman 
Rushdie, 
J.M. 
Coetzee 
and 
Kazuo Ishiguro, whose work 
has challenged and tempered 
what we can do with language.
The Man Booker’s reputation 
for the slightly odd renders 
it 
a 
particularly 
exciting 
and unusual prize. Graphic 
novels, black comedies and 
“historiographic metafictions” 
have graced both long and 
shortlists, 
genres 
typically 
underrepresented in the world 
of 
literary 
accolade. 
This 
year’s 
winner, 
“Milkman,” 
follows the story of unnamed 
characters in the unnamed 
town of an unnamed country 
overrun with violence between 
unnamed political groups. Its 
author, 
the 
Northern 
Irish 
Anna Burns, plans to use the 
prize money on an operation 
to alleviate the intense nerve 
pain 
that 
complicated 
the 
release of “Milkman.” In an 
interview with The New York 
Times, Burns shared that “If it’s 
successful, I’ll be able to write 
again.”
The Booker Prize Foundation 
is using their power to promote 
and protect the weird, and we 
at The Michigan Daily Book 
Review are here for it. We’ve 
covered the shortlist for you: 
texts ranging from longform 
poetry noir to a psychological 
retelling of “Oedipus” on a 
houseboat — odd birds that 
might be the household names 
of the next decade.

VERITY STURM
Daily Books Editor

FABER AND FABER

JOHN DECKER
Daily Arts Writer

You can learn a lot about 
“The Long Take” by studying 
its cover art. A grey and obscure 
photograph, in it a foggy night 
scene features a pair of roads 
sloping upward through lighted 
tunnels. Shadows play across 
the 
foreground 
and 
recede 
into the distance. Above, on 
a hill, elegant 1940s and ‘50s 
cars are lined up in a neat little 
row, at first unnoticed in the 
dark atmosphere but gradually 
coming to take on an outsized 
presence. Off-center, to the 
left, a solitary figure of a man 
stands on the medium, frozen 
in the act of lighting a cigarette 
under a burnt-out street lamp, 
silhouetted against the bright 
interior of the tunnel behind. 
As far as one can tell, he is 
completely, utterly, alone.
It’s a classic film noir shot.
Robin 
Robertson’s 
Man 
Booker-shortlisted 
“noir 
narrative” is difficult to pin 
down. At once it’s a novel 
and 
an 
extended 
narrative 
poem (or, in some tellings, an 
“epic,” whatever that means 
in our post-classical age). It’s 
simultaneously 
a 
nostalgic 
homage to and a critique of 
the film noir genre. It both 
romanticizes and recoils from a 
certain mid-century manner of 
portraying the world. Whenever 
you try to put your finger on 
exactly what it’s trying to say 
about any particular theme it 
seems to slip just out of your 
reach, leaving little more than a 

general impression and a sense 
of having been in the presence 
of something meaningful. This 
is both frustrating and enticing, 
and it’s only at the end of the 
book that things start to come 
together in such a way that you 
can say, “right, this is what it’s 
about.”
What it’s about is The City. 
And the traumas of war, and 
the isolating nature of pain, 
and homelessness and cars and 
ingratitude. But mostly The City.
There’s 
a 
moment, 
not 
too far into the story, when 
the protagonist, Walker — a 
returned 
and 
traumatized 
World War II veteran from the 
North Nova Scotia Highlanders 

— is interviewing for a job at the 
Los Angeles Press, making the 
case for why he’s a worthwhile 
person to take on.

“‘I’m interested in films and 
jazz. Cities,’
‘Cities?’
‘Yes. American cities.’ /
‘What about American cities?’/
‘How they fail.’”

This 
essentially 
sums-up 
Robertson’s own preoccupation 
in this book, which, more than 

anything, is about the particular 
way in which Los Angeles — the 
seat of glamorous Hollywood, 
the 
wide-open 
Western 
automotive paradise and the 
American Dream — functions 
as the god who failed. Though 
Walker alights briefly upon New 
York and San Francisco, it’s 
here, in the sprawling Southern 
California megalopolis that’s 
played host to so many noir films, 
that Walker carves out a place 
for himself in the bleak space of 
his postwar existence. Against 
the monochromatic smear of 
its grey and black palette, Los 
Angeles is already, in its relative 
infancy, showing the signs of 
corruption creeping up through 
the sun-cracked concrete.
Throughout the book abides 
this 
pervasive 
feeling 
that 
there’s 
something 
rotten 
at 
the core of America, a slow 
putrefaction eating away at 
its body, “an infestation, a 
carcinoma.” And postwar L.A. 
is the perfect setting to explore 
it, where it seems like the seed of 
this creeping disease is already 
germinating. After all, L.A. is 
only a stone’s throw away from 
the same Orange County that 
gave 
us 
then-congressman 
Richard Nixon, who peripherally 
appears in the book in his old 
trappings of a cold warrior, 
smiting Alger Hiss from the 
heights of his HUAC seat — and 
if America’s mid-century decay 
has an avatar, Tricky Dick is as 
good a candidate as any other.

‘Everything Under’ tries 
‘Oedipus,’ doesn’t succeed

DAYTON HARE
Daily Arts Writer

MAN BOOKER PRIZE WINNER

THE LONGLIST

BOOKER PRIZE FOUNDATION

‘Milkman ’ investigates

“Milkman”

Anna Burns

Faber and Faber

May 15, 2018

“Everything 
Under”

Daisy Johnson

Graywolf Press

Jul. 12, 2018

JULIANNA MORANO
Daily Arts Writer

‘The Long Take’ explores 
poetry, noir and the city

THE SHORTLISTED

Read more at MichiganDaily.
com

“The Long 
Take”

Robin Robertson

Picador

Feb. 22, 2018

THE SHORTLISTED

Read more at MichiganDaily.
com

