Winning the Man Booker prize is clearly a life-changing event, but never more so than in the case of Tuesday night’s surprise success, Anna Burns, who became the first Northern Irish writer to win the £50,000 award for her third novel, Milkman. Go back four years and Burns was unable to write for excruciating back pain, living peripatetically around England, house-sitting when possible, struggling to make ends meet and using food banks (which she thanks in the acknowledgments of the book). When she was finally able to send the manuscript to her agent, it was turned down by several publishers. What an end to the story.
“I was thinking that when I got back to the hotel last night,” the 56-year-old author says when we meet. In good Booker tradition, she has only had a couple of hours’ sleep. “When I look back to 2014 – with this horrendous pain, wondering: ‘Will I even finish Milkman?’ And then Booker winner? The extremes … It feels wonderful, it feels dreamlike. Did that really happen?”
She is still in a lot of pain (the result of a surgical injury), and the interview is conducted with her perched on a low table or, periodically, standing up. “I still can’t get back to writing,” she says, “but let’s not talk about that today. It’s nice to feel I’m solvent. That’s a huge, huge gift.”
Milkman, a novel ostensibly about the trauma of growing up during the Troubles in 1970s Belfast, unexpectedly beat American heavyweight Richard Powers’ eco-epic The Overstory and Esi Edugyan’s exuberant slave survival story, Washington Black, to the prize. It is actually set in an unnamed city, in an unknown era (references to Kate Bush, Sigourney Weaver and Freddie Mercury give us a clue), the characters known only in terms of their relationships to others.
“Although it is recognisable as this skewed form of Belfast, it’s not really Belfast in the 70s. I would like to think it could be seen as any sort of totalitarian, closed society existing in similarly oppressive conditions,” Burns explains. “I see it as a fiction about an entire society living under extreme pressure, with longterm violence seen as the norm.”
Her novel is, in many ways, an attempt to show how abnormal this normality was, the lack of names giving it an almost dystopian, futuristic quality. Many readers, especially younger ones not so familiar with recent Irish history, have found parallels with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
All three of her novels – Milkman, Little Constructions (2007) and No Bones, which was shortlisted for the then Orange prize in 2002 – have drawn on her background in conflict-ridden Belfast, exploring the psychological fallout of living in such “a hair-trigger society”. But Milkman, she feels, is the most political, the most explicitly about the Troubles. She says people ask her: “Are you still writing about Ireland? You have to let go, you have to move on.
“I think: ‘How do I move on?’ The Troubles is such an enormous, immense occurrence in my life, and in other people’s lives, that it demands to be written about. Why should I apologise for it? It is a very rich, complex society in which to place a fiction.”
Burns belongs to the school of novelists for whom characters just “come and tell me their stories, in their voices”. She is not very comfortable talking about her writing. Now that the book is finished and the characters have gone, she says: “You just get me. I’m sure they’d give you a great interview, but you’ve got me.”
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
