Milkman or Jeeves?

Anna Burns’ novel, Milkman, won the Man Booker prize this year. It follows an 18-year-old girl growing up in Belfast in the Troubles. Worth reading? Maybe another Angela’s Ashes?

Frank McCourt’s memoir heart-breakingly describes the hardship of his childhood in Limerick in the 1930 and 1940s. It’s a book I enjoyed because I found it profoundly moving. My view of Milkman is influenced by even a Booker judge calling it a difficult book and by James Marriott’s review in The Times yesterday. He says that it has “wilfully inelegant prose style, with repetition, circumlocution and paragraphs stretching over pages”. Well, I bet Ulysses got similarly snarky reviews in 1922 so maybe it’s a masterpiece. James Marriott is more than fair. He cites this excerpt in which the girl’s mother worries about the size of her bum.

“Here seemed a sensitive, painful, microscopic depiction of ma’s view of the growth of her behind, with nothing brash or crude or dumbed-down or of popular culture in the description either. My response therefore, should be comparable to her own words, should be of like tone and weight in order to acknowledge and to respect her older status, even her originality in delineating the depth of her rear condition in relation to the chair she was speaking of.”

What’s that all about? James Marriott calls it a “winner with a sour taste”. On the same page in yesterday’s The Times is a review of Ben Schott’s Jeeves and the King  of Clubs by Patrick Kidd. This is a different proposition; “this jolly homage in which Bertie turns spy hits the spot” and the aptly-named Kidd supports his claim with this gag.

”You’ll have heard of the Official Secrets Act,” the head of the secret service begins on his first meeting with Wooster. Bertram shakes his head, then brightly adds: “Just goes to prove how effective it is, what?”

Tellingly, Jeeves is allocated more column inches than Milkman and although Jeeves and the KoC deserves to sell more copies the Booker badge may lure pretentious readers to grapple with Anna Burns’ impenetrable prose. What’s new.

5 comments

  1. What finally persuaded or induced the Wodehouse literary estate to allow Mr Kidd’s effort? Do we know?

    1. Mr Kidd wrote the review. Mr Schott, the listogist ? – wrote the homage. But that doesn’t answer your question.

    1. I was writing on a ‘phone and intended “listologist” but I much prefer listsmith, thank you. I was in a rush because I was hurrying to meet Frank Pickles’ mother for lunch.

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