Her dog can have a name (Lassie), as can her classmates at night school in town, but her "maybe-boyfriend" cannot. We find out she's 18, female, a middle sister, even that her community is among those "renouncers" – "the only time you'd call the police in my area would be if you were going to shoot them" – but it's a mystery how she was baptised. You might call this place a region, or a province, or six counties, or the North of something else – but whatever you say, you'll brand yourself. In Milkman, Anna Burns's Man Booker Prize-winning darkly comic novel, names are black magic, and silence is better. Yes, it's the Seventies, and we're in a "hair-trigger society" of bomb scares, hijackings, talk of "our community" and "their community", electrified signals "of murals, of traditions, of newspapers, of anthems", right up to the spectre of "the soldiery, the paramilitary" – but nothing must be named. The "renouncers" here aren't exactly the IRA, the "defenders" aren't exactly the Army.
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