Meike's Reviews > The Colony

Now Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022
A novel set on a remote Irish island in 1979, and it couldn't be more timely: An English painter and a French linguist visit the island, both following their own agendas while also claiming that they are helping the poor, isolated community. Magee talks about colonialism, cultural identity and arrogant savior-types who don't listen to the people they state to help, and while the first half moves very slowly, the story picks up speed and becomes a real thriller, but crafted as a chamber play.

On the small island, we meet one of only 12 families living there: Four generations, mainly consisting of three women and teenager James. James' father, uncle and grandfather were fishermen and have drowned, but these dead men keep haunting the family and the book: They are a lost past the women can't break free from.

The first foreigner to arrive is English painter Lloyd, who stays as a tourist with the family and promises the matriarch that he will only paint nature, not the islanders - but of course he portrays the family, seeing himself as some kind of English Gauguin. Is he, the representative of the colonial power, here to submit the representation of island identity to the colonial eye, to exploit the Irish for his own glory as an artist? Not only that, he also makes promises to James, himself an aspiring artist who wants to avoid life as a fisherman at all costs.

Enter Masson, a French linguist with an Algerian mother (France was of course the colonial power of Algeria) who has come to the island for four years to study the Irish language - he aims to get a doctorate and score a job at the department with his work about a language threatened with extinction. Seeing Lloyd, he is shocked that the Englishman might corrupt the Irish speakers on the island with his colonial tongue, thus messing with his study. Whether the islanders want Lloyd there, what language they want to speak - that's of no importance to Masson, which doesn't mean that he isn't certain that he is doing the right thing. He just thinks he knows better than the islanders what's best for the island, and that this is a deeply colonial standpoint doesn't register with him (just read Terre d'ébène by Masson's compatriote Albert Londres, who follows the same logic in the realm of African colonialism).

The novel is set on a small speck of land, it has a limited cast of characters, and most action is developed out of conversations and descriptions of language and paintings, so cultural products. But the backdrop of this is violence: Again and again, the story is interspersed with short, factual descriptions of terrorist attacks committed in the context of the Troubles. Although the islanders live on the Western edge of Europe, far out, they have brutality as a steady background noise, broadcast to them from Dublin, Belfast, and elsewhere in their country. Magee names the victims, their ages, the families they left behind.

This text is filled to the brim with smart sentences, intelligent ideas about identity, self-determination and representation, and beautiful prose (including what Christoph Ransmayr would call "flying sentences"). The ending is quietly devastating, and the whole thing is just extremely well done. If this doesn't get nominated for the Booker, I will be SHOOK.