“The Colony” by Audrey Magee:
This is a brilliant, beautifully touching novel, a thoughtful play on the private and the political, of the impact of nature on life and art and the restrictions of tradition, of the war between classes, cultures and genders.
Two foreigners, one an English painter, the other a French linguist, separately travel to a remote Irish island. The one, following a romanticized notion much in the sense of Gauguin on Tahiti, wants to capture the island’s and the islanders’ beauty. The other also wants to capture beauty or rather, by way of recording the islanders' tales, preserve the beauty of a dying language. Each one claims the island as his discovery/ playground/ property. It comes as no surprise that they don’t like each other.
The novel begins with a chucklingly funny description of how the English painter, driven by cliche, stubbornly wanting it the old way, crosses the channel to the island on a self-made boat, a currach, oared by two Irishmen and gets violently seasick. This comical episode shines with all the wit and dry humour of the islanders and is a good introduction to their often stoical, sometimes fatalistic attitude.
As the two visitors are paying guests the household which hosts them, grudgingly tolerates both of them. In contrast to the often childishly complaining visitors the islanders possess a simple dignity, although their lives aren’t easy. Over the summer each of the women and men on the island, but also the visitors, are forced to question their values and desires. At the end of the summer the visitors leave and for some everything has changed.
The Colony itself is a community of the few remaining islanders on this piece of rock in the sea, three miles long and half-a-mile wide. They struggle, as they always did, in an ever repeating pattern from day to day, trying to make a living from their meager surroundings. There are mostly old men left in this community and widowed women who lost their spouses to the sea. The characters are drawn convincingly and as individuals in their own right and never drift off into cliches. There are many internal monologues which deepen the understanding of the main character's individuality.
Irish is the main idiom used, English understood by most but not all. The only young male left, James, aged 16, speaks English and doesn’t want to be called Séamus, does not want to become a fisherman and, through a slowly growing trust and friendship with the English painter, discovers and develops his natural aptitude and love for painting and art. James is encouraged to return with the painter to London, to become an artist in his own right, only to be brutally disappointed in the end and left behind because he, the apprentice, became better than the master.
The titular colony serves as metaphor for broader conflicts. The many conflicts are overlapping, intersecting, merging or nestled within another: The conflict between the islanders and the visitors, the visitors themselves, between the islanders themselves, between the generations, between genders and between nations and languages.
Although the time set is when the Troubles in Northern Ireland were at their most violent and atrocities commonplace, the novel has a feeling of timelessness.
Slowly themes of national identity, of colonialism and imperialism, emerge, the old rivalry between the English and the French, the English oppressing the Irish, the French oppressing Algeria. Purity in language, purity in culture is put into question. What is deemed to be cherished and preserved, what should be fought for and with what means, what should be accepted as doomed? The novel portrays Irish lives cornered by the dead weight of tradition.
The deeply touching heart of the novel, though is the development of young James, trying to find his voice, purpose and destination, his hopes first raised and then left bitterly betrayed and disappointed.
Interspersed with the narrative are short, coldly detached, fact-cool reportages of terrorist killings which lend the novel a threatening, dark uneasy undertow and prevent the reader of losing himself too much in a fairytale of a remote island.
There is a beauty in the writing, the dialogues bring to life the fascinating characters, their points of difference, their attitudes and views on life. The prose is luminous and lyrical, a pleasure to read. How, for example an artist might think and feel in colours, forms and shades is rendered in eloquent and poetic prose. How everything seen is instantly perceived as a potential painting, with a title attached. Sometimes the text morphs into vertical columns of one-word lines, almost modern poetry, snatches of colors, emotions, light, sounds, smells. But even when the details of the trapping, killing and gutting of a rabbit are meticulously sketched it always is done so in a slightly distanced, detached voice. And there is always humour.
There is a slow tension, ever moving to rise to a climax, but then climax never comes, all falls back in the end to how it was before. For some, though the world is altered.
A truly remarkable, sincerely beautiful novel. It left me touched and, at the end, heart-broken for James.
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