The Colony: Audrey Magee

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and the bilingual James (or Séamus, his Irish name, which Masson insists on using despite his request not to do so), who dreams of another life in London: in the story itself, where one character's perspective is not shared by another's, over, and over, and over again. But when an English artist visits his west of Ireland island, James becomes completely schooled in art over the course of one brief summer. 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. A few days after he arrives a Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Masson, arrives on the mail boat. Masson is a linguist and travels to the Island to study Gaelic, which is threatened with extinction. He is trying to preserve, save, the dying language by writing a book. Mr Lloyd believes he is too late. The two take an almost immediate dislike to each other. Mr Lloyd thinks that it is inevitable that the language will die, while Jean-Pierre, or JP, is tired of the English destroying tradition, banning the inhabitants from speaking anything but Irish.

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. I'm feeling very much at odds with my GR friends over this year's Booker long-list: I seem to like best the books others are ambiguous about ( Trust, After Sappho) and actively dislike the books tipped for Booker stardom which nearly all my friends are raving about, including this one. The novel begins with an English artist – Mr Lloyd – travelling to a remote Irish Gaelic-speaking island off the West coast of Ireland where he intends to paint. Ostensibly he is travelling to paint the cliffs but he is also interested in all aspects of the traditional life of the islanders, starting by insisting on being rowed across the island in line with pictures he has seen in a book – and seems keen to emulate Gauguin and his work based around Noa Noa. 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. Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Reader Reviews

Austere and stark . . . a story about language and identity, about art, oppression, freedom and colonialism. The Colony is a novel about big, important things.' Financial Times

James becomes the pupil of the English artist, Lloyd, but he is exploited more than he is tutored—Lloyd has problems with perspective in his drawings (and in general) which James resolves for him, and then Lloyd steals the ideas that James thinks up for his own paintings. Shortly after his arrival on the Island to a frosty reception (particularly around any hints that he wants to paint the inhabitants rather than the cliff), he is disturbed when another visitor arrives on the island: a Frenchman “JP” Masson – a linguist determined to save the Irish language and using the Island both to preserve the particular dialect spoken and as a research case study for the way the language is being contaminated by English influences over time and across generations. A story about language and identity, about art, oppression, freedom and colonialism . . . A novel about big, important things.”

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 Colony is a brilliant novel, a subtle and thoughtfully calibrated commentary about the nature and balance of power between classes, cultures, genders. There is violence here, but, most impressively, Audrey Magee captures that more insidious cruelty—the kind masked as protection, as manners.” What is hope? What is your definition of hope? And success? Different people have different interpretations of how James should succeed. The end of The Colony allows people to graft their own interpretation of what James should do onto the framework of this story. Does he somehow get off the island to realise his own ambition as an artist? Or does he do what some see as the son’s duty: build his life around protecting all the mothers in his life, his own mother against Francis, his grandmother and great-grandmother against poverty, the mother tongue against disappearance? Or does he become radicalised by Lloyd’s treatment of him? Unbeknownst to him, Mr Masson will also soon be arriving for the summer. 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. The danger with books like this is that the grand political themes can end up stifling the human element or sapping the life out of the characters. Thankfully, for the most part, Audrey Magee does a wonderful job of conveying her characters with empathy and authenticity. The nagging cynicism I felt at first (that this was going to be a giant piece of pontificating Booker-prize-bait) eventually faded away. The Colony is a book I hope and expect to see featuring in the Goldsmiths and Booker shortlists (and another inexplicable omission from the 2022 Women's Prize list).A vivid and memorable book about art, land and language, love and sev, youth and age. Big ideas tread lightly through Audrey Magee's strong prose.' Sarah Moss James’s voice is more formative and explorative – as he tries to absorb the interrelated possibilities both of art and of escape/a new identity.

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.

That has to be The Bone People by Keri Hulme. It would not have come my way had it not been for the Booker, and I am very grateful to have had it in my life. At an early age, I learnt from Hulme that novels are a space for tough questions. Oddly enough in what is a very positive review of The Colony in the Guardian* I nevertheless find sentiments I can agree with : 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. Art is everywhere in this book. You could say Art 'dominates' Mairéad and James—when they are not being dominated by other forces.