A pitch-dark comedy on the wages of violence from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of 'Milkman'
— the first time it was awarded to a writer born in Northern Ireland. The success of “Milkman” has introduced new readers to the region’s troubled history, which has a peculiar tendency to creep into the present.first publishedWhereas “Milkman” concerns itself with the reification of rumor and innuendo in a city riddled with sectarian strife, in “Little Constructions” the focus is on the family and how trauma is passed from one generation to the next. And what a wild family it is.
The names are disorienting, but their anonymity avoids ascribing the gang’s criminal behavior to a particular faction . The surname certainly suggests that these men and women were destined to wear a toe tag.Humor and death amble side by side, as when the murderers forget themselves in spooky stories: “They’d stop for a break, for example, whilst in the middle of killing somebody, and over the boiling kettle and KitKats, they’d begin a round of the latest ghost talk.
By pretending not to see what is right in front of her eyes, Julie is forced to become a bystander in her own home, hewing to what she considers the town’s credo: “If it’s happening to you then, thank God, it’s not happening to me.” If the atrocities she encounters are real, she’ll have to do something about them, and that’s much more frightening than a body on the floor. By denying the reality of these horrors, Julie can cope — at least until the psychic toll comes due.
The novel’s narrator is an unnamed bystander, one who is intimate with every villager’s secret history — even the secrets they shelter from themselves — and whisks the reader forward and back across time to show us how the sins of the past manifest in the future. The narrator’s quintessentially Irish deadpan humor elevates the seriousness of Burns’ endeavor, making it more than just another bleak story about The Troubles.
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