Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > The Colony

2nd in my 2022 Booker Prize longlist rankings - my Bookstagram rating, ranking, summary review and Book themed Golden Retriever photo is here:: https://www.instagram.com/p/ChHzX-TMI...

A really fascinating and distinctive fictional examination of the effects of colonization – ranging from artistic appropriation, through language (cleverly both external dialogue and internal monologue) to the legacy of violence.

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.

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).

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.

The two take an immediate dislike to each other – JP due to Mr Lloyd’s corrupting influence on the island’s linguistic evolution, Mr Lloyd due to JP’s disruption of the peace he needs for his art – while both compete in different ways for the affection of the attractive Mairéad.

Over time we understand more of both visitors drivers:

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).

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.

The first real strength of the book alongside the themes it examines is its use of interior monologue.

Lloyd’s thoughts start fragmentary both reflecting his uncertainty around his status on the Island and his examination of everything he sees as a potential (and often actual) subject for his continuing sketching, but gaining in confidence over time as he starts to assimilate James’s advice and ideas.

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.

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.

Mairéad’s is still haunted by the loss of her husband and her desire to make her own life choices within the duties and responsibilities placed on her by others, not least the Francis.

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 second is the way that the main storyline – which can seem at first like a timeless fable, interacts with the other part of the book: a chilling and historically precise description of the circumstances leading to the death of the victims of the Northern Irish Troubles in 1979.

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.

Overall highly recommended – and a book which lingers in the mind and in which my review covers only a fraction of the ideas and involved (for example the extensive discussion of art) or the novels strengths (for example the brilliantly wry dialogue of the islanders to and about Lloyd and later JP).