Ari Levine's Reviews > The Colony

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE

4.5 stars, rounded up. I'd be extremely surprised if this didn't make the 2022 Booker longlist, and maybe even the shortlist.

Magee has succeeded admirably in painting a lyrical and precise portrait of a tiny community of Gaelic-speakers living on a small rocky island off the west coast of Ireland in 1979, at the height of the Troubles. The Colony accumulates realistic scenes of domestic life-- simple meals, cliffside walks, teatime conversations-- over the course of a summer.

Beyond these narrative pleasures and deft character studies, it's also a subtle allegory of the deep cultural scars left by British colonialism, and the illusory binary of tradition and modernity. Magee slowly ratchets up the tension and menace, interspersing narrative chapters of island-based events with terse journalistic accounts of the escalating death toll of sectarian conflict, whose waves ultimately lap up against the island's shores by the novel's end.

The locals are alternatively bemused by and resentful of two outsiders, who embody two different variants of colonialist objectification and the imperial gaze. Lloyd, a middlingly-talented and middle-aged English landscape painter, arrives on the island as a figure of ridicule, seeking a truly authentic experience of windswept cliffs and pristine solitude. He lodges in the home of a young window, Mairéad, who becomes his muse, the Gaelic equivalent of Gauguin's Tahitian maidens. Lloyd nurtures the artistic ambitions of her teenaged son James, absorbing and exploiting his painted images, as the pupil quickly surpasses his master's achievements.

Jean-Pierre Masson, a Parisian linguist, also arrives on the island for his fifth summer of fieldwork, seeking to preserve the authenticity of Gaelic from the encroaching influence of English, which Lloyd has thoughtlessly brought with him, contaminating his best-laid experiments. But JP's motives are just as impure as Lloyd's, and he projects his fantasies of linguistic purity upon the villagers, especially Mairéad's monoglot mother and grandmother; and he treats Mairéad like his concubine. In flashbacks, it's revealed that he himself is post-colonial: his mother was Algerian, married to a French soldier, and that the islanders' Gaelic is an analogue for the Arabic he never learned to speak.

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.

Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Netgalley for sharing an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.