The Colony: Audrey Magee

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Audrey Magee paints her characters with a deceptively light touch and there is plenty of humour in the novel, but she has also created rounded individuals and doesn’t allow her any of them to become cliches, not even the elderly Bean Uí Fhloinn who may well sound familiar to anyone who studied the work of a certain pipe smoking Blasket Islander for the Leaving Cert. There is great joy in the paragraphs showing the islanders politely feeding the visitors and then heading off for a walk to discuss how they really feel, while a clever use of Irish phrases alongside the English translation gives the novel an authentic feel that won't alienate any reader.

The inclusion of Keating in Orpen's painting echoes Lloyd's Gauguin painting too. He added James into his scenario, wearing his hand-knit jumper—but carrying a brace of rabbits and not the paint brushes that James had requested be included. James's rendering is very much from Lloyd's perspective. He is fixed forever as an island boy and not as an artist. I am a bit torn as to whether this is a 4 star or a 5 star book. It definitely has all the hallmarks of 5 stars, but the ending frustrated me a bit. It's definitely not tied up with a bow, and the reader is never spoon fed. And I normally love that . . .but in this case, I was so invested in the characters that I felt a bit like I was watching this incredible drama, and the season ended. And I can't wait to be united next season with the characters, and then the show was cancelled. There's just so many directions the book could go that I almost can't stand not knowing what the author was thinking . . . Audrey Magee is an Irish novelist and journalist. Her debut novel, The Undertaking, was nominated for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2014. [1] [2] [3] [4] Her novel The Colony was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. [5] Biography [ edit ]

BookBrowse Review

The Colony” is noticeably bereft of plot yet draws the reader into a world that is idyllic in its quietude. It is set on an unspecified island on Ireland’s Atlantic coast in 1979. The island has been stripped of population. Fishing has been the island’s means of sustenance and the residents have gradually left for more vibrant population centers that offer greater opportunities. At the outset of the story, the island’s population is under twenty people. The traditions of the island’s language and culture are eroding in a vortex of a changing, more complex world. The author is also particularly dexterous in switching from interior monologue immediately and seamlessly to dialogue or to another character’s interior - with the two streams blending seamlessly together.

The Colony is a vivid and memorable book about art, land and language, love and sex, youth and age. Big ideas tread lightly through Audrey Magee’s strong prose.”In 1979 an English artist seeks to re-invigorate his painting (and his life overall) by visiting an island off the Atlantic coast of Ireland where life is still firmly rooted in the past, but where the reality of the world on the mainland encroaches in fits and starts. Residents, particularly the young, face the question of whether to stay or leave. 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’ There are layers on layers [in The Colony]—art, revolution, passion and cheating, who is lying to whom, and how much do we lie to ourselves . . . What price are we willing to pay for creativity and fame?” 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).

By the novel's halfway point, Magee channels the characters' inner lives through extended soliloquies, expressing all of the desires they can't bring themselves to speak out loud. The only flaw is the novel's oblique and muffled conclusion, when the narrative tension mysteriously dissipates, but I was thoroughly transfixed by this novel until the very end. Very highly recommended.The significance of the isolated island to these visitors, the significance of the visitors to the islanders, and the interactions among them are interrupted with increasing frequency by news of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Old and new, insiders and outsiders, human nature and politics; the uneasy tug of war among all these things. 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.