The Colony: Audrey Magee

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But what Lloyd sees when he looks at the boatmen in his hired currach are mostly cliches: “sinewy / agile strength/ sun-stained hands”. Its beautifully realised lament for lost language and cultural sustainability has universal relevance.

In his optimistic moments, he imagines making work that will get him talked about as the “Gauguin of the Northern Hemisphere,” doing for this rocky Atlantic outpost what the French primitivist once did for Tahiti. 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. In one telling moment, Mairéad and her brother-in-law Francis discuss the Mountbatten assassination in which two teenage boys were also killed.

Islands, in fiction, are always metaphors – and, as a rule of thumb, the smaller the island, the bigger the metaphor. 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. I don't mind that there's no closure to the narrative, though it is framed by an arrival and a departure by boat - but there's not much story in between either which is a big ask to keep me reading for around 400 pages. The Colony is set during that Summer on a remote Gaelic speaking island when Earl Mountbatten and others were blown up and sectarian assassinations or attempts took place almost daily. This word receives several meanings and shades in the novel, and the island with its inhabitants is the place which can be appreciated if not fully comprehended only by those who want to bond themselves with it.

I read two longlisted books written by an Irish author back to back, which was accidental but also welcomed. 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. The island cliffs are, he says, more “rugged” and “wild” than those in England: a fanciful notion, fraught with dubious politics. Her second novel, The Colony, published in 2022, has already been optioned for film and is receiving stellar reviews around the world.

It also had an almost cinematic quality I found appealing - I liked the dialogue heavy scenes the best; if it weren't for the interior monologues, this might make for an intriguing film. Photograph: Aurélien Pottier/Getty Images View image in fullscreen The Colony is set on a small island in the Atlantic. An expertly woven portrait of character and place, a stirring investigation into yearning to find one's way, and an unflinchingly political critique of the long, seething cost of imperialism, Audrey Magee's The Colony is a novel that transports, that celebrates beauty and connection, and that reckons with the inevitable ruptures of independence.

A careful interrogation, The Colony expertly explores the mutability of language and art, the triumphs and failures inherent to the process of creation and preservation. The nagging cynicism I felt at first (that this was going to be a giant piece of pontificating Booker-prize-bait) eventually faded away. He is one of the island’s few remaining teenagers and is determined not to succumb to a life as a fisherman (barely surprising as both his father and grandfather drowned). 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.After a lurching, punishing crossing from the mainland in a currach (he finds the motorboat inauthentic), Lloyd is dismayed to discover that he is not the only visitor with designs on the island.

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. Magee’s characters clearly exist primarily as a means of exploring ideas about imperialism in Irish history and the politics surrounding the Gaelic language. James (or Seamus to JP) spends time with the English artist and finds out he has an aptitude for painting - which opens up new possibilities for him.

The occasional broken lines of stream-of-consciousness are quite effective, and Magee obviously has a great affection for the history and culture of the book’s setting. The first real strength of the book alongside the themes it examines is its use of interior monologue. 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.