The Colony: Audrey Magee

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It loses two stars for: an often meandering, stream of consciousness style of writing (I'm sure some sentences ran over a page); a frequent lack of clarity of the book's message; rather unsatisfactory plot elements (I won't spoil anything by giving details); a sometimes plodding style of expression. The novel’s overall subject is, as the title implies, colonisation – and Magee teases out its personal, cultural and political ramifications through a small island colony off the west coast of the Republic of Ireland.

James somehow escaped me then, his level of sophistication regarding life in general, and especially regarding everything related to art, far outstripping my own—though this West of Ireland girl has been learning scraps of art history and art technique throughout her life. The artist who arrives at the island expects to exploit it for his own ends and leaves after achieving them and destroying hopes of some of the inhabitants. An engrossing story with real three dimensional characters that immerse you in their world from the start and deliver a profoundly rewarding experience that will leave you thinking and reflecting for a long time afterwards.Jean-Pierre Masson, a Parisian linguist, also arrives on the island for his fifth summer of fieldwork, seeking to preserve the authenticity of Gaelic from the encroaching influence of English, which Lloyd has thoughtlessly brought with him, contaminating his best-laid experiments. Magee has succeeded admirably in painting a lyrical and precise portrait of a tiny community of Gaelic-speakers living on a small rocky island off the west coast of Ireland in 1979, at the height of the Troubles. James lost his father, uncle, and grandfather to the waves when he was an infant, and it is his mother Mairéad who scans the sea in the vain hope that one day her husband, father, and brother will rise up from the bottom of the ocean.

Her first novel, The Undertaking, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, for France’s Festival du Premier Roman and for the Irish Book Awards. Such an INTERESTING novel about imperialism, colonisation, language and art, beautifully written and oh my God, the West of Ireland dialogue. With the Troubles at a boiling point on the mainland, the islanders host two summer visitors - one a painter from England, the other a linguist from France. Both strangers want something of the island and are doing what they need to obtain it, without thinking about the consequences or what they leave behind. As it happens, the conflict between the two will affect more the family who hosts them than the visitors.A good novel strengthens empathy as well as the imagination and encourages us to see another world from a perspective that travels beyond our own interests. Lloyd has come to the island as a Gauguin only to discover that one of the Tahitians is already the finer artist. Audrey Magee's latest novel is set in 1979 on an unnamed island off Ireland's Atlantic coast where traditional life and language are receding to extinction. The little island colony, to which they come, functions then as a perfect microcosm of the colonised.