This is a story that deserves telling and one I wanted to hear (clearly, otherwise I would have DFNed the book weeks ago!) but I found it terribly difficult to stick with and to like it.

Burns offers a shrewd and interesting analysis of a society under psychological siege, presented from the atypical perspective of an unwitting teenage casualty of forces she slowly grows to understand but is often powerless against. The book is set in an undefined version of what we suppose to be Belfast in the late 1970s, where people and, famously, the streets have no name.

Because of this setting, the novel deals with grave and lofty themes and ideas, albeit often in a lighthearted way. This is a book about denial and self delusion, the place of women and of the individual in society, paranoia and social pressure. And Burns is rather good at deconstructing all these, whether they apply outwardly or have been internalised by people

Spoiler

(The scene in which the narrator finally surrenders to Milkman by getting into his van is absolutely chilling).

Oddly though, she doesn't really get to grips with sectarianism. In fact religion is secondary to the narrative and a source of ridicule mostly, dismissively presented as a woman's thing. As if Burns wasn't herself immune to the prejudices she aims to denounce. Homosexuality gets a rapid mention but is not really explored in this pressurised context of enforced conformity, while race doesn't get a look in at all.

However, Burns' contribution and message are, in my view, completely lost and undermined by her writing, which is often circular, and tedious as a result. The book is bogged down in minutiae and, more annoyingly, a blizzard of words that obscures its narrative.

Burns and her narrator suffer from a bad case of logorrhoea that manifest itself by an odd inconsistent mix of colloquialisms and awkward, clunky, or even bad syntax, with highfalutin vocabulary and turns of phrase. Apart from anything else, the language isn't authentic to the voices using it, even to that of a main character/narrator steeped in 19th century literature. That narrator, who is supposedly laconic, simply cannot stop wittering. Rather than a stream of consciousness, the reader is engulfed by a flood of chattering.

In the end, the book just stops without real ending/closure, as if stopped mid florid flow, at a point of the narrative that isn't particularly significant. One feels the story could have stopped earlier (which would have been a mercy), or carried on for as many pages or more.

I wanted to like this book but I found it very difficult to come back to it and persist reading it, the chattering nature of its language acting as an unwelcome barrier. A missed opportunity, I fear.