Hugh's Reviews > The Colony
The Colony
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Hugh's review
bookshelves: booker-longlist, modern-lit, read-2022, read-2024, five-leaves-bookclub
Aug 05, 2022
bookshelves: booker-longlist, modern-lit, read-2022, read-2024, five-leaves-bookclub
Read 2 times. Last read March 11, 2024 to March 13, 2024.
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022
This was one of the books that was being tipped most widely before this year's Booker longlist was announced, so I was very keen to read it, and for the most part it lived up to the high expectations which that created.
The setting is a rocky island off the Atlantic coast of Ireland whose small population contains some of the "purest" native Irish speakers. The plot, which is something of a microcosm for the wider history of Ireland, is driven by two summer visitors, their mutual antagonism and their oppositely blinkered views of what the community wants/needs. We meet the English painter Mr Lloyd first - he is something of a colonial caricature, bringing unrealistic expectations of material comfort and an arrogance with the locals. The other is M. Masson, a French language scholar who is writing a history of the Irish Gaelic language and fears that its last pure speakers are being lost. Masson is much initially more popular with the community, but becomes more nuanced as the story continues (as indeed does Lloyd (view spoiler)).
The story is set in 1979, and the narrative is often interrupted by short matter of fact descriptions of the murderous progress of the Troubles in Ulster, which seem a little jarring at first but eventually become crucial to the story.
This was one of the books that was being tipped most widely before this year's Booker longlist was announced, so I was very keen to read it, and for the most part it lived up to the high expectations which that created.
The setting is a rocky island off the Atlantic coast of Ireland whose small population contains some of the "purest" native Irish speakers. The plot, which is something of a microcosm for the wider history of Ireland, is driven by two summer visitors, their mutual antagonism and their oppositely blinkered views of what the community wants/needs. We meet the English painter Mr Lloyd first - he is something of a colonial caricature, bringing unrealistic expectations of material comfort and an arrogance with the locals. The other is M. Masson, a French language scholar who is writing a history of the Irish Gaelic language and fears that its last pure speakers are being lost. Masson is much initially more popular with the community, but becomes more nuanced as the story continues (as indeed does Lloyd (view spoiler)).
The story is set in 1979, and the narrative is often interrupted by short matter of fact descriptions of the murderous progress of the Troubles in Ulster, which seem a little jarring at first but eventually become crucial to the story.
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Bianca
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rated it 4 stars
Aug 05, 2022 01:04PM
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I agree - it was only the first couple of reports of deaths that seemed a little jarring, and that was before the political context of the rest of the story was established (apart from Lloyd's arrogant sense of entitlement). As for James's fate, we can speculate about that, but the author has left this open deliberately, and his prospects in London might not have been much better.