The Great Gatsby is easy-difficult: it's no problem to read, but to appreciate its thematic architecture takes attentionīooks can be “difficult” in all sorts of different ways.

The narrative would become heavy and lifeless and refuse to move on until I took them out again.” In other words, it is like it is because it has to be that way. In the early days I tried out names a few times, but the book wouldn’t stand for it. “It lost power and atmosphere and turned into a lesser – or perhaps just a different – book. “The book didn’t work with names,” she has said. One of the things that has most vexed its critics is the fact that none of the characters has a name. But complaining about the hike per se is to give up on the idea that there might be any case for art that rewards an investment of energy and attention from its consumer.Īnd the way Burns talks about Milkman makes clear that, whether we like it or not, she is doing something with the “difficulty” of the novel. What is it doing with its difficulty? What is it asking of the reader? Does that difficulty reward the reader’s investment of time? You’re entitled, as James Marriott did in the Times, to conclude that in this case the view from the top of Snowdon wasn’t worth the hike. The question isn’t how difficult a book is, but why it’s difficult. The question is not where the book sits on some notional sliding scale between “challenging” and “page-turner”: it’s how successfully it answers whatever challenge it sets itself. Photograph: Frank Augstein/APĪttacking a literary prize for rewarding a book that doesn’t accord with a critic’s ideas about “readability” is simply philistinism. “Their creative imaginings would reach my ears slander by gravitational slander.Anna Burns is presented with the Man Booker prize by Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall. “All this made sense within the context of our intricately coiled, overly secretive, hyper-gossipy, puritanical yet indecent, totalitarian district,” she writes.

The whole town is engaged in a culturally enforced conspiracy of gaslighting. “At the time, age eighteen,” she says, “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 leveled 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?” What’s worse, her community, even her family, assumes that she’s to blame for enticing the milkman away from his wife. But what makes him so destructive to the narrator’s mental health is that she has no vocabulary with which to resist or even describe what’s happening to her. The milkman is a character of mysterious power amid a vast network of spies, bombmakers and killers.

Milkman anna burns