Burns milkman6/6/2023 ![]() ![]() Milkman is a novel set in the Belfast of the uneasy 1970s but the city, like the lead protagonist, is never named. It can only mean enlightenment.”īurns is the teacher and we are the students. “Your unease, even your temporary unhingement in the face of this sunset is encouraging. The amazed, bewildered, unsettled class discovers that the sky is pink, lemon, mauve and orange-red. She takes them to the window overlooking the city and demands that they look at the sky, really look at it, and tell her what they see. “Why all the fancy footwork when all he need say is that the sky is blue?” someone cries and a chant begins: “Le ciel est blue! Le ciel est blue!” until the teacher’s calm unnerves everyone and the chanting stops. The author had been describing the sky in French with a bevy of trying metaphors and finally the class mutinies. There’s a moment about a third of the way through Anna Burns’s Milkman when the un-named narrator is in an adult education French class who rebel against the difficult novel their teacher has assigned as homework. ![]()
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