The Colony: Audrey Magee

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Audrey Magee worked for twelve years as a journalist and has written for, among others, The Times, The Irish Times, the Observer and Guardian. In London, I was told by a work colleague that he would no longer talk to me as I ‘had killed Mountbatten’. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. It’s a novel that both courts and refuses allegory, charting a disorienting course between a piercingly satirical realism on the one hand, and on the other, something much cruder – parable, perhaps, or fable. James lost his father, uncle, and grandfather to the waves when he was an infant, and it is his mother Mairéad who scans the sea in the vain hope that one day her husband, father, and brother will rise up from the bottom of the ocean.

It loses two stars for: an often meandering, stream of consciousness style of writing (I'm sure some sentences ran over a page); a frequent lack of clarity of the book's message; rather unsatisfactory plot elements (I won't spoil anything by giving details); a sometimes plodding style of expression. JP is the son of a French soldier and an Algerian mother his father met on active duty – and is conflicted by his own past with a preference for assimilation in France over retaining his mother’s colonised Arabic language. Not only that, he also makes promises to James, himself an aspiring artist who wants to avoid life as a fisherman at all costs. The Colony’s nameless Irish island stands, as the title perhaps too pointedly suggests, for all colonies, and Lloyd for all colonisers.Lloyd sails back “to Freud, to Auerbach, to Bacon”, JP’s professorship is in the bag and that very special Irish melancholy settles again over the island. Over the summer, each of them--from great-grandmother Bean Uí Fhloinn to widowed Mairéad to fifteen-year-old James, who is determined to avoid the life of a fisherman--will wrestle with their values and desires.

He lodges in the home of a young window, Mairéad, who becomes his muse, the Gaelic equivalent of Gauguin's Tahitian maidens.The two novels are different in subject but I still see the Church playing a central role in both historical accounts. At the very least, he will please the “half-wife” he has left behind in London who doubles as his dealer and has recently taken to telling him that his paintings are derivative and dull. A novel set on a remote Irish island in 1979, and it couldn't be more timely: An English painter and a French linguist visit the island, both following their own agendas while also claiming that they are helping the poor, isolated community.