I’m not sure you expect people to read Milkman (Against the odds: Anna Burns wins the Man Booker prize, 17 October). According to your report and your commentary (‘A smartly provocative choice for the competition’, 17 October), it will “baffle many readers”, “may not be the best novel in contention”, is “experimental” (twice) and a moderate challenge for readers of the Journal of Philosophy. The apparent problems are that the book is an interior monologue, there are no proper names, and the paragraphs are longish.
Well, I couldn’t put it down, and I was brought up on a council estate. That may be the point. The embattled working-class community and the mock-heroic demotic are done brilliantly. The detail on daily life in the Troubles is eye-opening. And it made me laugh. Ignore the write-up, folks, and read the book!
Alan Horne
Poynton, Cheshire
• If politicians can’t quite manage the Booker prize-winning Milkman yet (The novel all politicians should read, 18 October), they could start with some fine young adult fiction set in Northern Ireland: Bog Child, by Siobhan Dowd, about an iron age body found straddled across the border in the midst of the Troubles in the 1980s; and Joan Lingard’s classic series of Kevin and Sadie novels, starting with The Twelfth Day of July, about a young couple – one Catholic, one Protestant – who are in Belfast, and in love.
Alison Leonard
Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire
• “What’s the point of being ‘Alive, alive, oh’ unless you also risk being dead as a doorknob?” writes Margaret Atwood (Spirited away, Review, 13 October). The phrase is “dead as a doornail”. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase And Fable says a doornail is “either one of the heavy-headed nails with which large outer doors used to be studded, or the knob on which the knocker strikes”. This is followed by a quotation from Dickens: Christmas Carol Stave 1 – “Old Marley was as dead as a doornail”.
Also, on the matter of “Jacks”, this was used, at least up into the 1960s, as Liverpool slang for the police. Hence the title for a BBC police series of that time, Jacks and Knaves. I believe this series was also the starting point for what was later developed into the long-running Z-Cars programme.
Dean Smith
Chesham, Buckinghamshire
• Since its very first issue, I’ve found inspiration in the Guardian Review. Unlike its “supplement” contemporaries, with their flaccid newsprint and cumbersome shapes, the Review has been completely rethought – and it shows. I wish I had kept them all.
Its covers are fluid and graceful or harsh and blunt. Printed on quality paper in a handy format, it covers an eclectic range and choice of the crucial books in every genre of the age, interspersed with author portraits and commentary.
So why am I complaining? Looking in every corner, I’ve been unable to discover the name of the editor. You should give her or him full credit. Failing to do so is simply unkind.
Maurice George
Ormskirk, West Lancashire
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters
• Do you have a photo you’d like to share with Guardian readers? Click here to upload it and we’ll publish the best submissions in the letters spread of our print edition
.jpg?w=600)
