The Colony: Audrey Magee

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The Colony is a brilliant and thoughtfully calibrated commentary about the nature and balance of power. JP is the son of a French soldier and an Algerian mother his father met on active duty – and is conflicted by his own past with a preference for assimilation in France over retaining his mother’s colonised Arabic language.

I was caught like an unsuspecting rabbit in the net of this book, and days after finishing, I'm still struggling to escape its hold. The island is now largely denuded of population – and his main interactions are with one three generational family: the matriarch Bean Uí Néill, her daughter Mairéad (whose father, husband and brother all died in one fishing accident) and her son James (Séamas) Gillan; Francis (Mairéad’s husband’s brother – a fisherman on the mainland but still very influential on the island - who wants to take his dead brother’s place in her bed) and Mícheál (a trader and boatman). At first this seems like an odd mix, then over time changes into a thematic counterpoint (as my comments imply) but by the end the two storylines gradually but impactfully bleeding into each other – with first the characters discussing what they hear on the radio of the atrocities but eventually them considering how the events impact on their own plans.there is droll humour, too, and the whole is animated by her characters' often entertaining back-and-forth. Photograph: Aurélien Pottier/Getty Images View image in fullscreen The Colony is set on a small island in the Atlantic. Throughout, Magee inserts impassive accounts of lethal attacks between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland — 1979 was the height of violence in The Troubles, culminating in the bombing deaths of Lord Mountbatten and his family while on a sea cruise — and while at first these interludes may seem to be background colour, they eventually make clear that the few dozen inhabitants of this unnamed island consider themselves to be thoroughly Irish; fully developed adults with opinions and self-awareness of their position in the world (hardly the “primitives” who would need an Englishman and a Frenchman to argue over what’s best for them. She was Ireland Correspondent of The Times for six years, and wrote extensively about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the subsequent peace process and the chaos caused by the Omagh bomb.

This is a slow burning drama that builds to say something much bigger about notions of national purity and colonialism. The visitors are here to paint, to record, to celebrate - so they say - this island and its purity, the language all but vanished across the water. He wants the authentic experience, to be changed by this place, to let its quiet and light fill him, give him room to create. The little island colony, to which they come, functions then as a perfect microcosm of the colonised. Coincidentally, Lisa and Jacqui (JacquiWine’sJournal) both reviewed this book last month, and both are worth reading.The colony recognises some of the fundamental ironies in the situation the islanders find themselves in. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. Now I better appreciate what Audrey Magee was doing with her multiple plot lines which at first seemed too many and even too didactic in parts. An expertly woven portrait of character and place, a stirring investigation into yearning to find one's way, and an unflinchingly political critique of the long, seething cost of imperialism, Audrey Magee's The Colony is a novel that transports, that celebrates beauty and connection, and that reckons with the inevitable ruptures of independence. 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.

All of the atrocities happened in 1979 – the year, it is later confirmed in an aside, when the action of The Colony takes place. The writing is expressive, with various motifs running through it – like rabbits, apples, smells – and refrains, like “young widow island woman”. 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). Financial Times'A vivid and memorable book about art, land and language, love and sex, youth and age. LISA MCINERNEY'The Colony is a brilliant and thoughtfully calibrated commentary about the nature and balance of power.After a lurching, punishing crossing from the mainland in a currach (he finds the motorboat inauthentic), Lloyd is dismayed to discover that he is not the only visitor with designs on the island. Whether the islanders want Lloyd there, what language they want to speak - that's of no importance to Masson, which doesn't mean that he isn't certain that he is doing the right thing. Lloyd has come to the island as a Gauguin only to discover that one of the Tahitians is already the finer artist.