The Colony: Audrey Magee

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It’s a novel that both courts and refuses allegory, charting a disorienting course between a piercingly satirical realism on the one hand, and on the other, something much cruder – parable, perhaps, or fable. This is a slow burning drama that builds to say something much bigger about notions of national purity and colonialism. She studied German and French at University College Dublin and journalism at Dublin City University. While Lloyd hides away, painting his magnum opus – which draws inspiration from Gauguin (another artist who worked in a colonial, exploitative environment) – the islanders discuss whether they should be worried. Coincidentally, Lisa and Jacqui (JacquiWine’sJournal) both reviewed this book last month, and both are worth reading.

In that novel, emotions were bleached from the page, forcing the reader to dispassionately observe action and reaction, choice and choicelessness. Magee tracks her two unlikable protagonists as they ransack the island for their own ends, each believing that they have its best interests at heart.JP, initially confident of his welcome on the Island and in love with language, starts both fluent, wordy and heavily figurative – before over time moving into both a more academic and more suspicious register as the Islanders make it clear he is as guilty of appropriation as Lloyd. The Colony is a novel of outstanding resonance, with a portrayal of language in a post-colonial landscape that is both masterful and subtle. Lloyd’s part-estranged wife is a successful modern art dealer and exhibitor who has derided his traditional painting as derivative – when James starts to show some artistic promise (to his chagrin pointing out issues in Lloyd’s painting) he both uses Lloyd’s ideas to improve his own art and proposes the idea of a joint exhibition of their work in London (with the rabbit hunting James – who is desperate to avoid his inevitable fate as a fisherman on the Island – to accompany him and start at art school). But, while it reports on a lot of Northern violence, because they are all the same island, the setting is not there. The occasional broken lines of stream-of-consciousness are quite effective, and Magee obviously has a great affection for the history and culture of the book’s setting.

I’m really curious to read this one, Sue, and have deliberately avoided most of the spoilers for that reason. It took me four goes to finally push through this to the end and I'm genuinely at a loss to understand why this is getting so much attention from reviewers whose opinions I respect and often share.

The Frenchman's motives are complex, and far from altruistic—he seeks to dominate both the beautiful widow and the language itself for his own private purposes. I was held, captivated, on this remote island with its wild landscape, unforgettable inhabitants, and two outsiders intent on finding their own version of the truth. On the small island, we meet one of only 12 families living there: Four generations, mainly consisting of three women and teenager James. In addition, the author inserts reportages about some of the murders which occur on the continent between the Protestants and the Catholics.

The Colony is brimming with ideas about identity and soul; a canny, challenging, and never less than engrossing read. I'm glad I was able to step back and examine this book more objectively than I was able to do when I began this review a few days ago. We know, surely, that the politics of colonialism operate across multiple fields including the cultural and the linguistic?

Now I'm able to to see how her writing style mirrors her themes—and I understand how useful it can be for 'point of view' to shift, whether in life, in art, or in writing. But the Frenchman is not content to simply record changes in language use, he also tries to force Mairéad and James to renounce English completely, though they are increasingly drawn towards English and the opportunities for a different life that it offers. The little island colony, to which they come, functions then as a perfect microcosm of the colonised. He just thinks he knows better than the islanders what's best for the island, and that this is a deeply colonial standpoint doesn't register with him (just read Terre d'ébène by Masson's compatriote Albert Londres, who follows the same logic in the realm of African colonialism). Her first novel, The Undertaking, shortlisted for both the Women’s prize and the Irish book awards, impassively dissected the lives of ordinary Germans caught up in Hitler’s murderous determination to obliterate the Soviet Union.

Lines set as verse make us privy to his imagistic cast of mind: “He looked then at the sea / rolling to shore / to rocks / to land / rolling from / white-fringed blue […] self-portrait: preparing for the sea crossing”. But when an English artist visits his west of Ireland island, James becomes completely schooled in art over the course of one brief summer.It is about a Gaelic speaking community on an island off the west coast of Ireland during the Troubles. Interspersed between chapters on the events and interactions on the island are much briefer chapters (often just paragraphs) describing one of the many killings that happened on the mainland at that time, as part of The Troubles. Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. Both will strive to encapsulate the truth of this place – one in his paintings, the other by capturing its speech, the language he hopes to preserve.