Book Review: No Bones is Booker Prize winner (for Milkman) Anna Burns' first novel, and similarly addresses the war zone that was Northern Ireland. Echoes of Milkman are abundant (yes, there's a milkman here, too, but everyone has names). If this novel is an only slightly distorted, many-year photograph of that brutal religious warfare, then Milkman is the unretouched negative: less clear, more stark. The novel contains an abundance of detail that can only be supplied by one who lived through those horrifying times. The story mostly follows young Amelia, living in the Catholic Ardoyne section of Belfast from 1969 when the British troops arrived to 1994 when there were stirrings of peace for the Northern Irish Troubles (a typically Irish ("it'll be grand") euphemism for a time that should have been called the Horrors). Each chapter is a terrifying stop along the way of that 25 year arc. A bit of knowledge about those extraordinary and abnormal times is necessary to fully understand No Bones, although they are expansively and painfully described. "Amelia was in blank mode. Amelia was at a funeral. She knew how to behave at funerals." Overarching all the moments and horrors are the simple lessons that insanity begets insanity and that violence begets violence: not in some trite circle, but in a magnifying and geometrically rising line, creating more horrors that beget greater horrors. The insanity of those desperate times drive the residents (especially the still-plastic children) to varying levels of fear, madness, and violence in response. In a community besieged, following on a history of 800 years of oppression, violence turns inward, murder is always imminent, British soldiers kill pet dogs, logic becomes unreasoning, rubber bullets become toys. As society deteriorates, so do families. As individuals begin to fall apart, descending into obsession and madness, people become wholly involved in the terror, viciously joining in the bloodshed, or become numbed, insulated, isolated, escaping into drink or psychosis. "The build-up to committing murder, as anyone will tell you, takes its toll on a person." Schools are no refuge, but only places of more and inescapable violence. Are the images and descriptions grotesque exaggerations devolving into dark humor, or simple reportage? As death leads to death there's no time to dwell on lost friends, there's just too many, so a moment to acknowledge and then back to a life that is anything but normal. For Amelia the guilt of the many deaths she never took time to properly grieve drives her into anorexia, madness, and an institution. "They'd all heard and forgotten about Danny Megahey ... already, he was gone." Although there are many examples of sexual violence, mental illness, and unexpected death, one of the most powerful scenes was simply Amelia describing how to get from one part of town back to Ardoyne, following a long and circuitous route so as to stay safely on Catholic streets, yet someone following the same path an hour later will die anyway. Burns' writing style reflects those Irish authors who came before her, a worthy part of the great Irish tradition, but she's wholly her own writer. No Bones seems like a first novel, however, in that Anna Burns tries to do too much: is this dark humor, is this a description of mental illness, is this a factual account of atrocities on both sides, is this reality become unbearable and distorted into grotesque fantasy. Is this a novel that reflects the complex chaos of the times by becoming complex chaos. The changing points of view are abrupt. At times it seems the descriptions of psychotic reactions will never stop. An eerie account of a shadowy time, a revealing journey for those strong enough to take it. [3½★]
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