Funny, chaotic, sad, sharp insight and mapping of how crazy makes people crazy.

You wouldn't think a novel about sexual violence and the lifetime work of recovery could be so funny. ( )

There’s a dark humor that leaps to the fore constantly in this novel, as Anna Burns tells of the story of the intimidation, secrets, rapes, and deadly violence in the Doe family/gang. Toxic masculinity rules, but there are also some very dangerous women as well. Again, Burns is extremely inventive and unpredictable. Here, just look at some of the names in the Doe family: John, Janet, Jetty, Jotty, Julie, JanineJoshuatine, JohnJoe, JesseJudges, and JimmyJesus. It’s like you need a team roster to keep them and others straight. The creative names don’t end there, as there are many colorful monikers for locations and conditions all through the book. There’s Tiptoe Under Greystone Cliff, which the residents call Tiptoe Floorboard, and there’s the Town Hall register of Births, Deaths and Rumours That Are Probably True. The Community Centre started out as a back garden shed and is now a huge underground complex that holds the core of the Doe family’s empire, and while the town’s other businesses may have other people’s names on them, the Doe family controls most everything. There is even something called the Leprechaun Museum, which hosts lectures like the one titled, ‘If you’re a Woman and Your Mother was Mentally Ill—You’re Fucked.” There is also the Confectionery Morgue (yeah, let that combination of words sink in), which includes such things as a three-story sweetshop, four gun shops, a tanning shop, a betting shop, and more businesses showing up all the time.

There’s also a unique series of explanations of the human condition. “Tom’s nose began to bleed but he didn’t accept this as reality. He thought it a simple hallucination complex, based upon his Former Personality Gone and Never Coming Back Disorder.” If a character has other problems, it must be Spatial Fragmentation Hallucination Syndrome. Syndromes are abundant throughout the book. Burns can’t just say bribe, but has to explain a massive betrayal of the family to the police and a stack of bills in Johnjoe’s hands, by referencing those two men in the Garden of Gethsemane from many centuries ago.

The book begins with the following lines. “There are no differences between men and women. No differences. Except one. Men want to know what sort of gun it is. Women just want the gun.” We then hear the story of Jetty (her sister is married to Big Chief John, the family leader) who rushed into a gun shop in need, and grabbed the nearest weapon and some scattered and mismatched bullets. “She didn’t want to know if it was an AK47 or an AK74. She called it a gun.” Which then led to, “Johnjoe was on a life-and-death mission to stop his Master and Commander’s wife’s sister shooting his Master and Commander.”

Let me pass on these other gems of prose that you’ll never find anywhere else. “From early morning these police had been spying on the shack from round the corner of the popular Leprechaun Museum.” Or, this other original bit of prose. “Although JaineJoshuatine has a reputation for going around stabbing people, in actuality she’d never stabbed anybody at all.” Lines, lines that are everywhere, lines that keep the readers on their toes. “After all, how do you think you’d start behaving if your daddy kept burying your granny, once a month, over and over, in different places, for years?” What? Wait? Come again?

For good reason The Guardian wrote the following review. “Energetic, convoluted, and courageous…. Every word matters and the oddities are a joy.” In another review (sorry I’ve lost track from where) it was said, “It's a bizarre and dark fever dream of a book that asks serious questions (and provides some unsettling answers) about misogyny and violence against women.” Still another review said of Anna Burns’ second novel: “John is the epitome of toxic masculinity, and Burns uses him to explore how men have historically regarded women: both as chattel and as objects of hate and derision. In one horrifying scene, John casually strangles his daughter while simultaneously insisting to his son that ‘I've never been violent. Never hit any of you.’ Burns’ style can make for tough sledding, but the intensity of her material justifies the effort.”

Burns seems to challenge the written word to keep her from going anywhere she chooses. She also seamlessly combines all manner of violence (murder, rape, incest, child molestation, IRA actions, and torture) with so much humor that a laughing reader will wonder if they will be damned for enjoying it, and then, with the very next line she gets you laughing all over again. She takes you into the convoluted reasoning of the time and the place with the following. “She tried to talk to the police at the start of her terrorization, but the police, you see, Tom, the police, oh God, the police, she discovered, were nothing but bigger versions of the small children themselves. These police children in their adult bodies said the right words that they had been taught to say at the police factory, but looking in their eyes, she knew they didn’t have a clue as to what any of those words they’d learnt by heart meant.”

The following lines just might make more sense. “At first I tried to reason. If she goes and digs up a coffin. I said, it would only put her down in history as the last of the Great Mad Does. By now her sisters, and indeed all her brothers and even her parents, were in jail, in graves, or in that mental asylum.”

There is a reveal at the end that explains some of the madness as to all the deaths and coffins, but still much is the result of the Doe family’s violent nature. There are countless odd things in the book, yet I’ll leave you with one of my favorites. Because of previous actions, Jotty had been sentenced to three counseling sessions a week, and had been going for more than a dozen years, but had never spoken one word other than to confirm the next session of her Not Speaking Therapy, and not surprisingly hadn’t reached the calming “We Are All One” state of mind.

I love how funny and deadly this book is. At times the Doe family brought back a famous Tolstoy line. "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Thank goodness, families are different, but I’m sure to remember the Doe family for some time. ( )

Wildly inventive yet in many scenes she hits the realistic spot. It's not a quick read in part because it's so tricky to keep track of the characters, particularly the Doe family who all have similar names: John, Johnjoe, Jetty, Jotty, Janet and even JanineJuliaJoshuatine. As readers of Milkman can attest, Burns' writing is eccentric but not to be missed. ( )

I loved this, clever, funny , dark and disturbing. I have never read anything quite like it. It is more a stream of consciousness ratger than a plot but some of the insights into people's thought processes are startling and fascinsting. I shall certainly be reading others by this author. ( )