“Milkman” by Anna Burns (post 8): Have any reviewers, including judges that awarded it the 2018 Booker Prize, actually read it in its entirety?

There is nothing further about multiple personality in the rest of the novel. It doesn’t lead to the climax. Indeed, there is no climax, if a climax has to be a little surprising. The title character, the bad guy, dies, just as predicted on page one. And life goes on in 1970’s Northern Ireland.

Does the multiple personality in this novel serve any purpose? Yes, it is the basis of the narrator/protagonist’s behavior, and her behavior drives the story, beginning with her reading-while-walking. The community finds this behavior very weird, because she is not just checking her smartphone (so to speak), but is really engrossed in 19th-century novels like Ivanhoe. People don’t know how a person can do this. But the reader knows (or should know) that she has one personality doing the reading, while another personality is watching where she is going.

The novel never addresses why she has multiple personality. Did it have anything to do with her late father, who had been mentally ill? Had she had any traumatic experiences? Her multiple personality is not only not explained, it is never explicitly acknowledged. (But at least she doesn’t try to kill people, as does the other character with multiple personality, the serial poisoner, “tablets girl.”) [Added April 6: I forgot that a third character, "chef," also has multiple personality.]

This novel is about two things: the protagonist’s behavior and the political/social problems of Northern Ireland in the 1970s. So if you don’t realize that the protagonist has multiple personality, you can’t understand what half of this novel is about.

But when I googled “Milkman Anna Burns multiple personality” or “Milkman Anna Burns split personality,” I didn’t find any book reviews that raised the issue. Had any reviewers actually read the novel in its entirety? Had they glossed over the passages I quoted in previous posts? Or had they just not thought of multiple personality, since it is not explicitly mentioned by the text or in author interviews?

To what extent does the author, herself, know that multiple personality, per se, is in the novel, since, she says, she just wrote what came to her. And she may see what came to her, from her own mind, as ordinary psychology. 

But as I noted previously, in regard to her mentioning the “host” (personality), she may know more than she has been willing to say. Or maybe she would be willing to say more, if an interviewer asked her.