Sometimes the difficulty is a surface difficulty, to do with vocabulary. Late Henry James is difficult in a wholly different way than Finnegans Wake is difficult, and Moby-Dick is difficult in a different way to either of those (mostly because of all that sodding scrimshaw). The Great Gatsby is easy-difficult: it's no problem to read, but to appreciate its thematic architecture takes attentionīooks can be “difficult” in all sorts of different ways. The narrative would become heavy and lifeless and refuse to move on until I took them out again.” In other words, it is like it is because it has to be that way. In the early days I tried out names a few times, but the book wouldn’t stand for it. “It lost power and atmosphere and turned into a lesser – or perhaps just a different – book. “The book didn’t work with names,” she has said. One of the things that has most vexed its critics is the fact that none of the characters has a name.

But complaining about the hike per se is to give up on the idea that there might be any case for art that rewards an investment of energy and attention from its consumer.Īnd the way Burns talks about Milkman makes clear that, whether we like it or not, she is doing something with the “difficulty” of the novel. What is it doing with its difficulty? What is it asking of the reader? Does that difficulty reward the reader’s investment of time? You’re entitled, as James Marriott did in the Times, to conclude that in this case the view from the top of Snowdon wasn’t worth the hike. The question isn’t how difficult a book is, but why it’s difficult. The question is not where the book sits on some notional sliding scale between “challenging” and “page-turner”: it’s how successfully it answers whatever challenge it sets itself. Photograph: Frank Augstein/APĪttacking a literary prize for rewarding a book that doesn’t accord with a critic’s ideas about “readability” is simply philistinism. Anna Burns is presented with the Man Booker prize by Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall.

The milkman anna burns