Marc's Reviews > The Colony

Audrey Magee clearly is a writer that likes to test her readers. This novel begins with a misleadingly simple plot: the short stay of an English painter on a remote island off the west coast of Ireland, covering the friction between the particularly unsympathetic and sullen painter and the few dozen Irish residents, that are represented as closed and living far from civilization. Can it be more cliché? But then Magee intersperses her story with short, journalistic reports of terrorist attacks in Northern Ireland (the year is 1979); the connection with the foregoing is not immediately clear, but the repetitive nature of the accounts underlines the brutality of the Northern Irish conflict. Finally, she also brings to the island a French linguist, a man who has made it his mission to record and preserve the ancient Irish language (Gaelic).

The subsequent interaction goes in different, interconnecting directions: the friction between the Englishman and the Frenchman, the naive hopes of a young islander to start an artist's career, his mother developing into a kind of faun and presenting herself as a nude model to the painter, the musings of the Frenchman on his youth trauma, didactic lessons on the history of Gaelic and on the brutal English colonization of Ireland, etc., etc. Gradually, the number of passages on the terror attacks in Northern Ireland increase, and the islanders also begin to comment on what they hear about that. And more and more the story takes the form of a series of interior monologues by different protagonists, with the narrative point of view jumping back and forth between the first and third person. And finally, there is also quite a bit of excitement and suspense about a mysterious canvas that the Englishman is painting of the islanders themselves.

Just to say: there is quite a lot in Magee's cocktail. But what is she really hinting at? As befits any great writer, the answer is not clear-cut. The most obvious storyline is that of the good and the bad: the Englishman as gruff and unreliable, the Frenchman as the savior of the true Irish soul, but, clearly, that is far too simple. Even the Irish islanders appear to be not just innocent sheep, neither the men nor the women; there is quite a bit of anger in them that expresses itself in very extreme opinions and behavior. It's as if Magee wanted to indicate that there is a terrorist or a fanatic in each of us.

Her ingenious use of style and perspective indicates that she had more in mind. At a certain point the book seems like an exposé about the interweaving of language and politics, about the charged nature of words and actions. And what with that title, ‘colony’? Does that refer to the English colonization of Ireland? To an artists' colony? or to the way in which people colonize each other...? I have to say that I'm not quite sure what to think of this novel, because despite the layering and the ingenious stylistic play, there also are quite a few weak elements in the book. As you can see, I'm struggling with it and I still haven't figured it out. So perhaps worth a reread.