Fionnuala's Reviews > The Colony

I was caught like an unsuspecting rabbit in the net of this book, and days after finishing, I'm still struggling to escape its hold. My intuition tells me that I need to step well back to see it clearly, that only time and distance will allow the patterns to make sense. Basically, I need to get past my own experience...and if you intend to read The Colony soon, perhaps you don't need to read more of this review in case the overlay of my experience interferes with your own perspective on the book.

Part of my inability to transcend my own experience comes from the fact that I identified very closely with one of the main characters: fifteen-year old island-boy James, wearing jumpers hand-knit by his mother, spending days on the cliffs catching rabbits with a net—and taking in every aspect of his wild Atlantic surroundings with an artist's eye though completely unschooled in art. I felt I knew James through and through. I felt I was James.

But when an English artist visits his west of Ireland island, James becomes completely schooled in art over the course of one brief summer. James somehow escaped me then, his level of sophistication regarding life in general, and especially regarding everything related to art, far outstripping my own—though this West of Ireland girl has been learning scraps of art history and art technique throughout her life.

I also identified closely with the time in which the book is set—the 1970s 'Troubles' period—when the radio, which was the main source of information in my parent's house as it was in James's home, brought news every day, in Irish and English, of yet another brutal killing in Northern Ireland, still a colony of Britain. And like James, my family knew of someone who went away regularly for a week at a time (a Milkman-type character), and who seemed to know more about those 'Troubles' across the border than the community cared to admit. We also heard reports of women from the Nationalist community in Northern Ireland being punished by their own people because they'd been 'fraternising' with the enemy—the British soldiers who were then in occupation. Some of those women were 'disappeared', their bodies not found until decades later.

So yes, perhaps I'm too close to this book to see it clearly so I need to step back and change my perspective, view the bigger picture as it were.
…………………

The bigger picture offers other echoes—from books I've read and paintings I've seen. The situation of the island boy with huge artistic talent, but initially no knowledge, reminded me of an Irish artist who was also an untrained islander: James Dixon, encouraged in his art over the course of many years by English artist, Derek Hill, who visited Tory Island off Donegal to paint in a little hut on the cliffs exactly as described in The Colony. That's a firm echo and helps to make the world of the book seem more credible to me. Here's an example of both Derek Hill's and James Dixon's Tory Island art:

Derek Hill

James Dixon

Fifteen-year old James catching rabbits recalls Maurice O'Sulivan's account of his childhood and youth spent on the Great Blasket island off the south-west coast of Ireland. In Twenty Years A-Growing, O'Sullivan describes all the activities James enjoys, rabbit hunting, climbing the cliffs in search of birds' eggs, or searching the rim of the sea for the return of his father, uncle and grandfather from a fishing trip.

And watching as the men unload the fragile canvas currach and lift it out of the water to store it safe from the fierce waves.


But James is less fortunate than Maurice. James lost his father, uncle, and grandfather to the waves when he was an infant, and it is his mother Mairéad who scans the sea in the vain hope that one day her husband, father, and brother will rise up from the bottom of the ocean. Mairéad reminded me of the grieving woman in J M Synge's drama, Riders to the Sea, and her very memorable cry when handed a scrap of clothing that is all that remains of her last son, drowned in a fishing tragedy: There's nothing more the sea can do to me.

In one of her interesting meditations, Mairéad wonders if the intricately patterned jumpers her loved ones wore might survive longer than their bones which she knows have long been transformed by the sea, reminding me of a verse I love from Shakespeare's Tempest:
Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Mairéad is a very interesting character, and a very sophisticated thinker. She seemed to play a symbolic role in the story, reminiscent of the 'spéirbhean' of early Irish poetry, the beautiful woman who visited poets in their dreams. Sometimes that beautiful woman represented Ireland and was given a name. One poet called her Roisín Dubh (Dark Rosaleen). Others called her Caitlín Ní Uallacháin. The artist John Lavery painted her portrait (his wife was the model) and that painting was used on Irish banknotes from the foundation of the Irish state in 1922 right up to the 1970s.



The 'Dark Rosaleen' poem I mentioned earlier was about Spanish ships coming to aid Rosaleen/Ireland in 1601 in the struggle against English dominance.
In 1798, French ships were also sent to help in the struggle, though only one ship landed in the end—at Killala on the Mayo coast. Incidentally, the dialect of Irish spoken on James's island is from that coastal area so I feel the 1798 episode (fictionalised in 1979 by Thomas Flanagan as The Year of the French) must have been in Audrey Magee's mind as she was writing The Colony. She gives Mairéad and James their her own version of being rescued from English dominance by the French. As well as the English artist already mentioned, a French linguist happens to arrive on the island that same summer. He comes to record the erosion of the Irish language through contact with English. But the Frenchman is not content to simply record changes in language use, he also tries to force Mairéad and James to renounce English completely, though they are increasingly drawn towards English and the opportunities for a different life that it offers. The Frenchman's motives are complex, and far from altruistic—he seeks to dominate both the beautiful widow and the language itself for his own private purposes.

Speaking of language, Audrey Magee uses it very skilfully. Sometimes her writing is terse, at other times, she allows her characters long streams of inner chuntering, Mairéad, in particular, whose thoughts are often intermingled with Catholic prayers so that I began to see her as a Virgin Mary figure in addition to being a symbol of Ireland itself. But there is also a refreshingly earthy slant to her thinking, something pagan overriding the Christian mantras:
…though god is good for he gave her first a son, a son who looks like his father so that her husband can live on, thanks be to god, thanks be to the lord god, a father living through his son, through him, with him, in him, thanks be to god, his father’s eyes, his father’s hair, his father’s chin, father, son and holy ghost, holy ghost of a man, of a husband, a lover, a friend, not a trace of him anywhere, in rocks, in grasses, in waves, in clouds, in rain, in prayers, in beads, in crosses, nothing, not a sign...for the sea took everything, beating him into fragments small enough to send across the earth on a journey of further erosion and rendering, pounding him into still smaller particles, atomised eternity granted unto him, oh lord, but nothing more, nothing for me to hold at night, to look at in the morning...

The sections of interior monologue often move from third person to first, as in that meditation of Mairéad's. Another example of such a switch in point of view mid-sentence is this line about the smell of linseed oil: James inhaled deeply, soaking his lungs in this otherness that I could breathe all day, never come out. That sentence took me back to the first time I smelled linseed oil and oil paints myself—and also to a Cézanne painting, one of the ones where the artist destabilizes the viewer by merging two perspectives, two points of view, so that we are simultaneously looking down on a bowl of fruit and looking up at an isolated fruit beside the bowl.



Art is everywhere in this book. You could say Art 'dominates' Mairéad and James—when they are not being dominated by other forces.
James becomes the pupil of the English artist, Lloyd, but he is exploited more than he is tutored—Lloyd has problems with perspective in his drawings (and in general) which James resolves for him, and then Lloyd steals the ideas that James thinks up for his own paintings.
Mairéad too becomes interested in art and eventually becomes Lloyd's muse, fraternizing with him in a way that disturbs those Islanders who are fanatically anti-British. She becomes Eve, suffering ever after for wanting to taste the apple of knowledge.

At one point in the story, Lloyd decides to recreate the Gauguin painting called 'Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?' using Mairéad as the model for the central Eve-like figure, reaching up to pluck fruit from a tree..


I could see why the author chose that painting since the title sums up the dilemmas of the island community in 1979 when it was becoming more difficult to live completely cut off from progress as their ancestors had done—and as the Tahitians in Gauguin's painting of their paradise island life were trying to do.
Still, as Lloyd's large canvas progressed, I was reminded of a different picture entirely :



The painting, by Sir William Orpen, dates from 1916, a significant year in Irish history since it marked the beginning of Ireland's final fight for freedom from its British colonisers—attained in 1922 (but only for three-quarters of the country, hence the 'Troubles' in the north of the country where the struggle for freedom was still going on in 1979). Among other things, Orpen's large canvas is a comment on the conflicting pagan and Christian elements in communities in the west of Ireland. The figure in the top left corner is a west of Ireland artist called Sean Keating wearing homespun clothes from the Aran Islands. Keating had been a protégé of Orpen's just as Magee's character James was of the English artist Lloyd—and James wore similar woolen clothing. The semi-naked woman in the foreground of the painting, seated with her arms raised, is almost exactly as Mairéad is described in some of Lloyd's preparatory sketches for his homage to Gauguin.
The inclusion of Keating in Orpen's painting echoes Lloyd's Gauguin painting too. He added James into his scenario, wearing his hand-knit jumper—but carrying a brace of rabbits and not the paint brushes that James had requested be included. James's rendering is very much from Lloyd's perspective. He is fixed forever as an island boy and not as an artist.

Yes, The Colony gives the age-old conundrum of perspective an interesting revisit:
in the writing, where points of view shift frequently;
in the art, where James and Lloyd capture the same surroundings very differently;
in the story itself, where one character's perspective is not shared by another's, over, and over, and over again.
One person's colony to exploit is always another person's home where they just want to live in freedom—or leave if they choose.
But even when freedom from colonisers is achieved, there may still be someone dominating them, telling them how to view the world. In this book, that 'someone' is Mairéad's bully of a brother-in-law, who, unlike the Milkman in Anna Burns' book (set in the same year), controls all the perspectives in the end.

I'm glad I was able to step back and examine this book more objectively than I was able to do when I began this review a few days ago.
Now I better appreciate what Audrey Magee was doing with her multiple plot lines which at first seemed too many and even too didactic in parts.
Now I'm able to to see how her writing style mirrors her themes—and I understand how useful it can be for 'point of view' to shift, whether in life, in art, or in writing.