The Colony: Audrey Magee

Product Information

You’ve been a successful journalist before turning to fiction. What do you bring from your experience as a journalist to writing fiction? Is it a journalist’s curiosity and interest in seeking answers, or something else? 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). A story about language and identity, about art, oppression, freedom and colonialism . . . A novel about big, important things.”

He knelt on the concrete and slid the chest down the wall towards the boatman, the white plastic slipping under his fingers. We are not quite sure what to make of Mr. Lloyd when he arrives, vomiting from the currach. Will we like him, I mean. The islanders are polite, helpful but wary of him. Fifteen year-old James is the front man, taking care of Mr. Lloyd's needs. We like James straightaway. He is wiser than his years, and with an artistic gift superior to the Englishman's. Will James redeem Mr. Lloyd, we wonder.It's 1979 and a small island off the coast of Ireland hosts two distinctive guests. First there is Mr Lloyd, an English artist who has come to paint the cliffs. He is fussy and demanding, immediately setting noses out of joint. But he does strike up a kind of friendship with 15-year-old James Gillan, reluctantly taking him on as an apprentice. The other notable visitor is Jean-Pierre Masson, a Frenchman who has spent the last few summers on the island studying the Irish language, which is slowly dying out. The two men clash - Lloyd can't concentrate on his work with all the hubbub Masson is making, while Masson is annoyed by the artist speaking English, a malign influence on the locals. Also, they both have eyes on James's mother Mairéad, a beautiful widow. Interspersed with all of this activity are reports of murders in Northern Ireland, with the Troubles at its height. With the arrival of two foreigners, a painter and a linguist, a sparsely populated island off the Irish coast becomes the setting for life-changing choices and conflicts. Shaffi, Sarah (26 July 2022). "Booker prize longlist of 13 writers aged 20 to 87 announced". The Guardian.

This beautifully conceived novel explores the way in which language and culture can survive in a changing world. The novel expands to contemplate how differing cultures can intersect in a struggle for power, colonial dominance and imposition of values.One of the successes of The Colony is that it full of learning, from the Penal Laws, which contributed hugely to the decline of the Irish language, to the swift and brutal acceleration of violence by both sides in the Troubles. Magee skilfully layers these themes throughout the book. Both Lloyd and JP are high-minded about their respective endeavours on the island, their pursuit of authenticity, a word that is repeatedly used to excuse the various degrees of pillaging necessary to achieve it. Island life But James is less fortunate than Maurice. 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. Mairéad reminded me of the grieving woman in J M Synge's drama, Riders to the Sea, and her very memorable cry when handed a scrap of clothing that is all that remains of her last son, drowned in a fishing tragedy: There's nothing more the sea can do to me.

Now make the room an island, three miles long and one and one-half miles wide. Populate it. Give it ancestry and history. And human needs. Put it near The Troubles. So not quite a blank canvas when the Englishman comes, an artist in a slump. A lyrical, rich, and emotionally powerful novel. The Colony comes alive like a brooding and beautiful canvas painted off the Irish coast.”This was one of the books that was being tipped most widely before this year's Booker longlist was announced, so I was very keen to read it, and for the most part it lived up to the high expectations which that created. In one of her interesting meditations, Mairéad wonders if the intricately patterned jumpers her loved ones wore might survive longer than their bones which she knows have long been transformed by the sea, reminding me of a verse I love from Shakespeare's Tempest: The American author John Gardner reportedly said there were only two plots in literature: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. Audrey Magee's second novel is firmly in the latter camp, but with a unique spin. The Colony sees two strangers come to "town", which is to say, a small island off the west coast of Ireland, three miles long and a half-mile wide. In the late 1970s, this isolated strip is home to 12 families, or 92 inhabitants, most of whom view their summer visitors with a mix of scepticism and fear. I will volunteer to place myself in the literary time-out corner until I can sort myself out and get prepared to face disgrace should this win the Booker ;)

The 'Dark Rosaleen' poem I mentioned earlier was about Spanish ships coming to aid Rosaleen/Ireland in 1601 in the struggle against English dominance. Mairéad, who finds herself the object of the competing attentions of Lloyd, who wants to paint her, Masson, who wants and does get to sleep with her on his annual visits, and her terrorist sympathising nationalist brother in-law;Mairéad too becomes interested in art and eventually becomes Lloyd's muse, fraternizing with him in a way that disturbs those Islanders who are fanatically anti-British. She becomes Eve, suffering ever after for wanting to taste the apple of knowledge. As to winning, that would be a wonderful gift for The Colony, a novel that explores the societal controls around colonisation and their impact on language, art, violence and self-determination. I tell the story from an Irish perspective, but the narrative echoes the experiences of other countries around the world where there is a relationship or the legacy of a relationship between the colonised and the coloniser. Had to mull my rating and what I felt about this book overnight - it IS thought-provoking and very well written - and yet I wasn't ENTIRELY satisfied; although of the six 2022 Booker nominees I have read thus far, it is clearly the standout (which actually says more about the dearth of anything amazing in this year's list, rather than the virtues of this entry). Islands, in fiction, are always metaphors – and, as a rule of thumb, the smaller the island, the bigger the metaphor. The Colony’s nameless Irish island stands, as the title perhaps too pointedly suggests, for all colonies, and Lloyd for all colonisers. He sees with the colonist’s eye. The island cliffs are, he says, more “rugged” and “wild” than those in England: a fanciful notion, fraught with dubious politics. Lloyd is fiercely territorial about his temporary home. When another outsider arrives, he is indignant. His fellow visitor also carries colonial baggage: he is Jean-Pierre Masson, a Frenchman of Algerian descent. Masson is popular with the islanders. For one thing, he speaks Irish, being a linguist who specialises in “languages threatened with extinction”. But Masson, too, sees with politicised eyes. His Algerian mother was married to a French soldier who abused her horribly. Masson finds in the island’s Irish speakers an authenticity, a naturalness, that might bring him closer to his mother’s damaged world. ‘Imagine that,’ one of the islanders remarks. ‘A Frenchman and an Englishman squabbling over our turf’