Harare Review of Books

376 pages.

First published in February 2022.

Genre: Literary Fiction.

This first appeared in The Sunday Long Read, October 9, 2022 — Issue #360

My recommendation this week is for those who enjoy literary fiction. Audrey Magee’s The Colony was long-listed (unfortunately not short-listed) for the 2022 Booker Prize; having now read it, I would have loved to see it win.

Set on an island off Ireland’s west coast, it begins with Mr Lloyd, an Englishman, traveling there by currach to “paint the cliffs”. He has had a falling out with his art dealer wife, who finds his work boring and derivative, and he is hoping to create his Great Work. He has chosen, against advice, to cross to the island by currach because he is playing the role of the Great Artist. He does not make a great first impression on the boatmen, nor, later, on the islanders.

Mairéad, a young widow, lives on the island with her son, James, her mother, Bean Uí Néill, and her grandmother, Bean Uí Fhloinn. Her husband, brother and father all drowned together in a boating accident. They are the ghosts in the book, along with the other islanders who left to make their lives elsewhere, mainly in the US, and with The Troubles, which are recorded in short, interspersed reports of bombings and killings. Shortly after Lloyd arrives, so too does “JP” Masson, a French linguist who has been coming for five years for his PhD fieldwork about one of the last places where Irish is still spoken. The Irish language, the history of which is narrated in JP’s thesis, and the island, the background to everything, are the book’s non-speaking characters.

As one of the characters quips, this is the story of “the battle of the colonisers”: the forceful, passionate Frenchman who knows that language is political, and who wants nothing to change for the islanders, and the dismissive Englishman who thinks history is past, even as news of The Troubles reaches the island by radio. Lloyd’s self-centredness, initially excusable, is not benign at all, and JP’s passion for preservation has complex motivations. Young James—smart, wry, determined not to be a fisherman—is the true foil to Lloyd. But The Colony is also the story of the three women, of poverty and precarity, and of exploitation.

The author, an artist like Lloyd, begins with a blank canvas, and produces a masterpiece of restraint while making powerful points—showing, not telling us how the macro and micro intersect in the lives of these characters. While dialogue is not treated in a conventional way, and it is sometimes difficult to determine who the narrator might be, these are minor inconveniences, and they work well with the structure of the novel.

A very intelligent and moving book, beautifully done.

My rating: 10/10