May: Northern Ireland and United States of America

Read: Milkman by Anna Burns (Northern Ireland), Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang (United States of America)

During this period of Coronavirus lockdown, the sound of the doorbell is unnerving. Admittedly, 80% of the time, it is because someone (ususally me) has plugged the doorbell plug back into the wall after charging a phone/tablet/laptop, but those other 20% of times create an odd confusing feeling within me. Something from the past has come back into my life, a remnant of pre-lockdown life when the doorbell provided potential social interaction or more likely, social interaction for my children who were being invited out to play football for the seventh time that day.

A few days ago, I emerged from my house in this fog of confusion to find my friend Kenny and his children in a lorry, their belongings stacked in the back ready to be transported to Belfast. Kenny’s wife Nicola was following in a car and they were heading home after twelve years in Brighton. We said goodbye, struggling to find the right words for a goodbye - the type of goodbye that doesn’t have a hello on the horizon. They’re heading to Belfast to start a new church. I’m loosely aware of the sectarian violence that has blighted Northern Ireland and how messy this has made people’s understanding of what Christianity is and its role in society. Being a coherent voice in the midst of this historical backdrop is going to be one of the biggest challenges they face, separating Jesus from political friction. 

Kenny and Nicola have been leaders in the church I attend for the past few years and they kindly gave me a generous book voucher a while back and a book recommendation of Milkman, a book set in 1970s Northern Ireland, which has been hugely popular, winning the Man-Booker Prize in 2018. Most of the books I’ve read so far have been books found well off the beaten track of other readers, but this is a book that a lot of my friends have read and so gave me the opportunity to have some book conversations although these were conducted digitally and were therefore briefer than they would have been otherwise. That’s one of the negative side effects of lockdown life for me, that communication done digitally has less heart, less lingering, less detail. I long for face-to-face chats to be the norm once more.

Milkman is written in a semi-stream of consciousness style with the protagonist’s thoughts flying around the plot chaotically. None of the characters have names and are referred to as things like third brother-in-law, maybe-boyfriend, Somebody McSomebody and most confusingly (but only for a while) Milkman and milkman. The chapters are also massive (six in 348 pages). All of these details were things that my friends brought up quickly in what they found challenging about the book, but most persevered and found it really rewarding. 

Personally, I like the stream of consciousness style. Maybe I’ve read a few books that do it, but I think the reason is more because it is the way my brain works and reading it feels comfortable because of that. The characters’ lack of names almost seemed to go over my head; I only really noticed on a subconscious level and then when people pointed it out, I was surprised that it was an issue. Maybe-boyfriend, for example, became the character’s name for me and it was almost easier to track characters in this way because their names categorised how they fitted into the story. The big chapters though were tough. In life, we don’t have chapters, but I guess we do have days and weeks and months and years and categorising life is a way of handling the hugeness of it and I think chapters do the same thing. We like to read a chapter at a time; it’s a way of reading being a manageable thing we can slot into our day. Often, reading in the evening, feeling drowsy, I discipline myself to read until the end of the chapter and Milkman’s epics make this difficult to achieve and mean you have to submit to the discomfort of pausing mid-chapter. 

Author, Joseph Fielding described chapters far better than I have, describing them as “an Inn or a Resting-Place, where [we] may stop and take a Glass, or any Refreshment, as it pleases [you].” Even when I go from one chapter to another, I will often use the chapter break to get a drink, check my phone or rest the book upon my belly and consider what I have just read.

The plot tells the story of an 18-year-old girl who is harassed by an older man (the Milkman). She doesn’t know how to free herself from his stalking because whilst his actions are clearly manipulative and oppressive, it’s all in the vague area of him not doing anything technically wrong. Everything he does is also tied up in political and religious tensions. 1970s Northern Ireland is portrayed as a place of suspicion and rumour and she quickly becomes a victim of this through no fault of her own.

Kenny and Nicola grew up the next generation on than the characters in this book and Nicola said that the period that Milkman portrays was more extreme than her own upbringing but that residue of that era remained. One big moment in the book is the controversy created when maybe-boyfriend has part of a car in his house that came from an English car. Nicola said that the fear of anything English still prevails for some in Northern Ireland. My broad knowledge of the violence knew nothing of the way the conflict got into the everyday lives of people.

One moment that stood out for me was the protagonist’s reading while walking which is treated with huge suspicion and fuels the rumours that she is having an affair with the Milkman. It’s something I’ve done at times, when I’ve been so keen to carry on reading my book that I’ve used a twenty-minute walk to or from work to cram another chapter in. Crossing roads rather interrupts the flow of reading, but it is time-efficient and some people walk the streets glued to their phones and are essentially doing the same thing. Fortunately, I live in a city where my actions are unlikely to receive anything more than an inquisitive glance, certainly not suspicions that I am involved in terrorist activities.

The second book I read this month was read in one day. There are only two writers that I diligently check up on, eager to purchase their work shortly after it comes out. They are Chris Bachelder, an American writer who writes weird and wonderful books, novels like none other I’ve read. His novel, Bear v Shark is one of my favourite books ever. The other is Gene Luen Yang, a graphic novelist who is such an incredible story-teller. Most stories leave you impatient, wanting to follow a strand in more detail but denied, eager to get back to the plot, keen to move on, but Yang’s stories feel so fluid, taking you exactly where you want to go at every moment. The stories he weaves jump around all over the place, teasing you with hints, reaching way back into history and then bringing you back into the centre of the plot and all with a fluid beauty. 

My favourite graphic novel that he has written is American-Born Chinese, such a thoughtful comment on race and Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks is also incredible. This book was Dragon Hoops which tells the story of a high school basketball team, a subject matter I have no real interest in, but with Yang, it doesn’t really matter. The story was about the basketball team from the school he taught Maths at and initially, he had no real interest in the team, but as he got to know the students in it, he gets caught up in their battle to win the California State Championships for the first time ever and he takes the reader with him on this adventure. It’s not just a story about basketball either. The players have fascinating back stories and often those back stories lead Yang into fascinating historical detail about the nations the students come from. As with American-Born Chinese, Yang is sensitive and interested in racial dynamics and this is a thread that comes and goes within the graphic novel.

By the end of the evening, I was fascinated in basketball. Everyone’s raving about the Netflix documentary about Michael Jordan, The Last Dance (something I intend to get round to watching), but I’d urge you, interested in basketball or not, to dip into this great book.

Let me conclude by giving you some other recommendations for graphic novels. I’d never bothered with them for a long time (most people see it as nice subsection of literature) and then I stumbled across the incredible Maus by Art Spiegelman and ever since, I’ve read them and found them equally as satisfying as the greatest novels I’ve read. Here’s my top ten (I’ve deliberately chosen ten different authors: 

1. American-Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

Three separate stories that interweave to explore the Chinese-American adolescent experience

2. Bone by Jeff Smith

An epic adventure rivalling greats such as The Lord of the Rings. The main characters are bones.

3. Heimat: A German Family Album by Nora Krug

Second-generation German after the Second World War explores her uncomfortable family history.

4. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware

The tragic autobiography of an office dogsbody who meets the father that abandoned him as a child.

5. Maus by Art Spiegelman

Spiegelman tells the story of his Jewish father’s survival of the holocaust. The Nazis are drawn as cats, the Jews as mice. 

6. Fagin the Jew by Will Eisner

Eisner tells the back-story of Charles Dickens’ Fagin from Oliver Twist.

7. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

A tale of childhood in Iran when you’re the daughter of Marxists

8. Barefoot Gen by Nakazawa Keijz
Recounting the bombing of Hiroshima from the perspective of a young boy

9. Grandville by Bryan Talbot

Imagine Sherlock Holmes as a violent badger and you get Grandville.

10. Seconds by Bryan Lee O’Malley

Talented young chef Katie’s love and work life get complicated.