Paul Fulcher's Reviews > The Colony

Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize

He once more built a frame of newspaper, sticks and turf and squatted to see the fire move through his structure, watching the flames lick the timber and dried earth, releasing the cloying smoke that seeped into the room and coated his clothes, his books, smothering the smell of damp and mildew taking root on the surface of his shoes and boots
of my skin
smearing me
in smells
of them
their past
present still
in this turf that burns
ancient grievances
buried in this burnin earth
cow dung
pigs' excrement
rotten potatoes
famished bones
the fetid blood of war
of poverty
of blame
smothering me
suffocating
english lavender
dry-cleaned tweed
though he smells still
of paris
of coffee
of chocolate
his turf untainted

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).

This will certainly be a book much discussed by other reviewers and discussion forums, so I simply wanted to note what, for me, was the novel's most impressive feature, the way that Magee has consciously built on the language of the interior monologue in literature, from Proust through Joyce, Woolf, Beckett and, more recently Mike McCormack's Solar Bones, and given it her own unique flavour in the different styles of her protagonists (which also evolve as the novel, and their views, develop):

- the English artist Mr Lloyd, with his staccato speech which frames everything as a picture; this from the first chapter when he is timidly trying to board a small boat:

self-portrait I: falling
self-portrait II: drowning
self-portrait III: disappearing
self-portrait IV: under the water
self-portrait V: the disappeared

- and the contrast to the Proustian recollections of his colonial rival Masson, a Frenchman, determined to save the islanders' language and their heritage, even if that isn't what they want, and hiding a secret of his own (that he betrayed his own linguistic and cultural heritage);

- 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;

- 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:

He buried under the covers and rolled from side to sid basting his clothes and skin in the artist's oils and sweat, in pencil, charcoal and paint, rolling until he was certain that 11 smelt of something other than fish, because if I smell of some thing other than fish, of paints and oils, they might all see that I should leave, that I am not a fisherman, not a proper island boy, but something that has to be elsewhere, somewhere other than here looking after my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and now they're giving me the mother tongue to look after as well, to save that mother too, to save it all and the other mothers. I don't want so many mothers.

The way these voices blend in to each other, as one character overhears another and picks up the narrative baton is impressive. As is the way Magee incorporates reports of real-life killings from the Troubles in 1979 in a way that at first appears jarringly out of sync, but is gradually incorporated into the main narrative. And Magee also incorporates strong nods to art from Rembrandt through to Gauguin's somewhat problematical works.

4.5 stars

Two essays where Magee explains her approach:

https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/ess...

https://www.writing.ie/interviews/wri...