The Colony by Audrey Magee
About the author
Audrey Magee was born in Ireland and lives in Wicklow. Her first novel, The Undertaking, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, for France’s Festival du Premier Roman and for the Irish Book Awards. It was also nominated for the Dublin Literary Award and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. The Undertaking has been translated into ten languages and is being adapted for film.
Review
Ian McFarlane
Saturday 19 February, 2022
The Canberra Times
Irish history is tainted by tragedy, providing poetry, myth, and melancholic enchantment for many people, including myself. Audrey Magee was born in Ireland and lives in Wicklow. This is her second novel, her first, The Undertaking, having been shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, for France's Festival du Premier Roman and for the Irish Book Awards. The Undertaking has already been translated into 10 languages and adapted for film. A spectacular start for a writer that might threaten to set the bar dauntingly high for the supposedly difficult - psychologically as well as professionally - second novel. I'm pleased to report that Magee clears this hurdle with stylish ease.
The Colony weaves a beguiling cultural narrative in delightfully idiosyncratic prose, examining the struggle between a village family on a tiny island off the Irish Atlantic coast, and the conflicting aspirations of a visiting English artist and a French linguist, both harbouring their own personal and national rivalries. The Englishman, Mr Lloyd, a traditional landscape painter, wants to capture the authentic flavour of a remote Irish community with a vividness that might soothe the modernist expectations of his estranged wife back in London, while the Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Masson, hopes to earn a professorship with his definitive attempt to save the old Irish tongue. Typically for the islanders, the Englishman remains Mr Lloyd, reflecting centuries of Irish suffering under English imperialism, while Jean-Pierre soon becomes JP. Mr Lloyd tries to even the score by pointing out French colonial evils, such as the savage oppression in Algeria, but with little effect.
The two visitors, neither of whom suspected the other to be present, are renting a couple of old cottages from a family whose connections to the mainland provide a makeshift ferry service, while their limited bilingual abilities are sufficient to satisfy the needs of strangers. The family matriarch is Bean Ui Fhloinn, with a daughter, Bean Ui Néill, and granddaughter, the beautiful, Mairéad, whose husband, father, and brother, "the Holy Trinity of Men", have drowned at sea while fishing. There is also Mairéad's son, James, who refuses to fish, her brother Francis, and Michael, a part-time islander who runs the ferry service and financial arrangements with the help of Francis. The men speak English but not the women, although they understand more than their visitors suppose.
The year is 1979, a critical point in the Irish troubles, as global headlines report the assassination of the Queen's cousin, Lord Mountbatten, and members of his family, when the IRA explode a bomb on his picnic cruise vessel during a holiday in Ireland. The islanders regularly listen to radio broadcasts, and Magee interleaves brief news reports with short passages of neutral tone. Following the Mountbatten assassination, the island family, together with their visitors, bounce opinions back and forth, as the Frenchman and Englishman deepen their colonial accusations.
Magee captures the struggle to find meaning or justification with her extraordinary prose. She has an almost eerie power to somehow link flurries of conversational angst (sans quotation marks - a technique I usually dislike) to interior thoughts without causing confusion about which is which, and even more impressive, the ability to change seamlessly from third person to first in the same paragraph in a manner that carries the reader forward smoothly without distraction. Some passages, according to the mood or setting, are written as if creating free verse, with short line breaks, containing only a few words.
Complications arise as young James gradually persuades Mr Lloyd that he wants to try his hand at painting and become an artist rather than a fisherman, and the Frenchman, JP's, tape recorded interviews with the wise matriarch, Bean Ui Fhloinn, coax her gentle words towards support for his thesis on ancient language preservation. Meanwhile, Mr Lloyd's interior views on how his work is changing are interwoven with an increasing awareness of JP's rivalry.
With the visitors' relatively short summer visit ending, a crisis beckons as time runs out. Both men have used their presence to advance their own interests rather than those of art or cultural heritage. And certain members of the family have been deliberately ambivalent about their take on the Irish troubles.
I've always believed that good fiction can go to the beating heart of human reality in ways more likely to resonate with a reader than any textbook. A good novel strengthens empathy as well as the imagination and encourages us to see another world from a perspective that travels beyond our own interests.
And this novel is better than good. Its beautifully realised lament for lost language and cultural sustainability has universal relevance.