Anyone wanting to learn anything about The Troubles won’t find much in terms of firm facts or events. Instead we talk about the nations ‘over the border’ or ‘over the water’. Similarly, the name ‘Ireland’ is never mentioned. The novel is stripped of context: our protagonist is nameless, and refers to the people in her life by monikers like ‘maybe-boyfriend’ and ‘the man who doesn’t love anybody’. “At the time, age eighteen, having been brought up in a hair-trigger society where the ground rules were – if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn’t there? At eighteen I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment.” And it’s this original yet familiar, experimental yet mundane, nature that won Burns the Booker – perhaps deservedly, I can’t comment to its competitors, but it’s doubtless a book worth highlighting for that originality. The odd thing is how Burns blends all these contradictions into something that functions. Indeed, the whole book is a strange brew of contradictions: easy to read but intelligently-written, readable prose yet oddly wearing, an intimate story of one woman that manages to encompass a national struggle. Burns’ style is familiar yet distinctive.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |