Cover Image: The Colony

The Colony

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Member Reviews

So much to this story! So well written and literally blew my mind at times. Loved it so much. Many thanks to publisher and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

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I am a member of the American Library Association Reading List Award Committee. This title was suggested for the 2023 list. It was not nominated for the award. The complete list of winners and shortlisted titles is at <a href="https://rusaupdate.org/2023/01/2023-reading-list-announced-years-best-in-genre-fiction-for-adult-readers/">

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This is a multilayered book with a lot going on. On the surface, it’s a story about two men who spend a summer on an Irish speaking island off the west coast in 1979. It’s a story about Ireland, in particular Northern Ireland. It’s also a story about language, identity & colonialism. ⁣And it's also a story about family ties and feminism. Like I said, multilayered!!

Lloyd is an English artist, struggling to find his mojo and hoping to be reinspired by the cliffs of the island. JP is a French linguist, completing a 5 year study of the demise of the Irish language. While some islanders still speak only Irish, English is becoming more prevalent and is perceived as the language of progression. The presence of the 2 visitors causes tensions to rise as the islanders become more suspicious of their intentions. It also causes James Gillan, the youngest islander, who is bi-lingual, to consider pursuing a career in art, far away from the island. ⁣

The novel examines the unique nature of language which carries the history and essence of the islanders. Language is portrayed as a casualty of colonialism, where colonizers impose their language on the colonized. JP & Lloyd both represent French & English colonialists. JPs mother is Algerian and speaks French instead of Arabic. Lloyd is representative of the co-dependent relationship between Ireland & England. ⁣

The theme of colonialism & national identity is very topical in 1979 Ireland where the N. Ireland atrocities were possibly at their worst. Magee breaks each chapter with details of specific murders that occurred that year ⁣The island is in many ways a microcosm of the struggles taking place in the north with Lloyd & JP as the colonizers, the islanders as the colonized. ⁣

In addition to the enigmatic story of the goings on on the Island, and the flashes to N. Ireland to provide context, Magee also uses some unique structural effects which add to the beauty of the book.

Longlisted for the Booker Prize (in my opinion, it should have won!), this was one of my favourite books of last year. I look forward to reading whatever Magee writes next.

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I really enjoyed this book, particularly in its evocation of setting and exploration of language and colonization. The audiobook is excellent as well. Full thoughts on The Colony in my July 2022 Reading Wrap Up: https://youtu.be/v-AQ2RC0j3k

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Set on an isolated, sparsely populated island in Ireland during the Troubles, this exquisite novel raises issues of colonialism, artistic representation, linguistics and culture. Only 12 families lives on the island. Gaelic is still spoken but English is becoming more common. Two men arrive on the island for the summer. One is a French linguist trying to preserve the Irish language. The other is an English painter who promises to paint only the landscape, but does paint the islanders. Interspersed within the novel are accounts of the violence in the rest of Ireland.

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*received for free from netgalley for honest review* This was a very different book, something i will have to reread i think. Honestly not sure how i feel about this book, it was a entertaining read though.

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I just loved this! Magee writes beautifully about the environment and characters of the island in which she's set her novel, and you really get a feel for what life is like in this setting. I love the fluid writing style, the way the narrative dips in and out of characters' consciousnesses, the way we get such intimate access to their thoughts and wants. I also loved the commentary on colonization, language, and art. Expertly done, and I can't wait to read more from Audrey Magee!

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Five stars to this lovely literary novel that manages to deftly explore a number of themes while retaining the reader's attention with gorgeous prose and an evocative sense of place and time in history. From the beginning, violence lurks around the corner lending an added layer of tension. The characters are introduced in a quiet, elegant way and the author gives the reader space enough to get to know them. I look forward to more from Magee.

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Enthralling and deeply affecting, the novel is taking place on a nameless remote island off the West coast of Ireland, populated by only 12 families and stretching 3 miles long and half a mile wide. Still untainted by commercial tourism, its raw natural beauty is preserved as are the old ways of islanders’ life and their Gaelic/Irish language. It centers on the three generations of women—a widowed Mairéad, her mother Bean Uí Néil, and grandmother Bean Uí Fhloinn—Mairéad’s teenage son James/Séamus, her brother-in-law Francis, and Micheál who brought two visitors to the island. Their two visitors are an English landscape artist Mr. Lloyd and a French linguist Mr. Masson/“JP”, whose story with the islanders over the course of the summer in 1979 is narrated in chapters that alternate with factual news fragments about violent incidents occurring at the same time, each naming the victims and their family background, at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. While running parallel at first, these two threads of chapters/fragments slowly coalesce with the news reports echoing in the minds and talks on the island.

As the story gradually emerges from Magee’s deftly written prose that weaves conversations with interior worlds, I feel it would spoil the delight of reading this novel if I were to give the story outline. Instead, a few words about the themes and style, as these are as impressive as the story itself, multi-layered, inventively written and emotionally moving.

The novel speaks quietly but with great power about the issues of colonization, cultural identity, the originality vs. derivative in artistic expression, loyalty and betrayal, war as a tit-for-tat carnage, the tradition of women’s subservience… It packs such a wide range of themes that it would likely feel disoriented in the hands of a less skilled writer, but Magee encompasses them all with astonishing brilliance, depth and subtlety.

Magee’s narrating style and ingenious use of literary devices equally make it an unforgettable read. The dialogues and conversations written in spare prose alternate with the inner life of four characters (Mairéad, James/Séamus, Mr. Lloyd, Masson). And their interior monologues (feelings, memories, desires, observations…) are beautifully crafted in several forms. Lloyd’s fractured thoughts iterated in poetic snapshots, Masson’s Proustian flow of thoughts (NB: not as Proustian imitation but with the author’s original touch), and the lyrical narration of Mairéad’s and James/Séamus’ yearnings for freedom, each in their own way, with Mairéad’s nostalgia for the lost past and James’ hopes for a different future. What is additionally remarkable is that their interior lives often seamlessly blend with each other.

The enthusiasm of my reading friends motivated me to reach out for this book and I have no hesitation in warmly inviting others to read it. It’s only the summer now but this is already the highlight of my reading year (for contemporary fiction). It will stay with me for a long time.

Go raibh maith agat, Audrey Magee, thank you for gifting us this wonderful novel. And my many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an ARC via NetGalley.

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The Colony is a brilliant novel by Audrey Magee set on a small island off the cost of Ireland during The Troubles. An Englishman ( artist) and. Frenchman ( linguist) descend on the island for the summer mixing with the reticent islanders. Magee’s prose is truly exceptional with sparse, unsentimental references to “The Troubles” which are chilling in their simplicity….a blunt reminder how politics mixed with religion is deadly.

Highly recommend.

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I found this novel incredibly moving, and a unique perspective on a topic/theme written about often, "The Irish Question". Seeing the uprising , "war", of the Irish troubles through isolated islanders off the Irish coast, and their visitors, gave richer meaning to the atrocity of war and unreconcilable views that are ingrained in cultures. It gives a deep sense of what it is to be a colony, and its lingering effects, as seen through the interactions of these characters. The emotional betrayal goes deep as one reads through this novel, which is not simple in picking sides, good or bad, but shows the ambiguity of choices and trust in our fellow humankind. I did not feel uplifted by Magee's writing, but I enjoyed her craft and empathy with her characters; it is perhaps not a topic to feel uplifted by in any way, but necessary to explore.

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This is an amazing book - heavy with language, descriptions, atmosphere, sadness...everything. I became a resident, visitor, prisoner on the island along with the characters. Many different types of colonies were used in the story and historical fact also played a crucial part in illustrating national tensions, which the island residents felt keenly, if from afar. This book will deserve a reread. Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for a sending me a copy to read in exchange for a fair review.

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The Colony cleverly and slowly explores the deep and long term effects of colonialism on a people. Interspersed with news like snippets of “The Trouble”,

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The Colony is a sneakily allegorical exploration of colonisation and its enduring effects on colonised people; it’s sneaky because it seems quiet and measured, but this is a book that roars beneath the surface. Set on a tiny island off the west coast of Ireland in 1979, author Audrey Magee imagines this last outpost of monolingual Irish speakers under existential threat from two summer lodgers: an English painter (who fancies himself a modern day Gaugin; re-interpretive, not derivative, surely) and a French linguist (on the final year of the research that will be the basis of his PhD thesis, he resents the presence of an English speaker influencing his subjects’ virgin syntax). Throughout, Magee inserts impassive accounts of lethal attacks between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland — 1979 was the height of violence in The Troubles, culminating in the bombing deaths of Lord Mountbatten and his family while on a sea cruise — and while at first these interludes may seem to be background colour, they eventually make clear that the few dozen inhabitants of this unnamed island consider themselves to be thoroughly Irish; fully developed adults with opinions and self-awareness of their position in the world (hardly the “primitives” who would need an Englishman and a Frenchman to argue over what’s best for them.) This works as both historical fiction and as an exploration of an enduringly thorny topic, and I loved the whole thing. Rounding up to five stars.

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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. Magee talks about colonialism, cultural identity and arrogant savior-types who don't listen to the people they state to help, and while the first half moves very slowly, the story picks up speed and becomes a real thriller, but crafted as a chamber play.

On the small island, we meet one of only 12 families living there: Four generations, mainly consisting of three women and teenager James. James' father, uncle and grandfather were fishermen and have drowned, but these dead men keep haunting the family and the book: They are a lost past the women can't break free from.

The first foreigner to arrive is English painter Lloyd, who stays as a tourist with the family and promises the matriarch that he will only paint nature, not the islanders - but of course he portrays the family, seeing himself as some kind of English Gauguin. Is he, the representative of the colonial power, here to submit the representation of island identity to the colonial eye, to exploit the Irish for his own glory as an artist? Not only that, he also makes promises to James, himself an aspiring artist who wants to avoid life as a fisherman at all costs.

Enter Masson, a French linguist with an Algerian mother (France was of course the colonial power of Algeria) who has come to the island for four years to study the Irish language - he aims to get a doctorate and score a job at the department with his work about a language threatened with extinction. Seeing Lloyd, he is shocked that the Englishman might corrupt the Irish speakers on the island with his colonial tongue, thus messing with his study. Whether the islanders want Lloyd there, what language they want to speak - that's of no importance to Masson, which doesn't mean that he isn't certain that he is doing the right thing. He just thinks he knows better than the islanders what's best for the island, and that this is a deeply colonial standpoint doesn't register with him (just read Terre d'ébène by Masson's compatriote Albert Londres, who follows the same logic in the realm of African colonialism).

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. But the backdrop of this is violence: Again and again, the story is interspersed with short, factual descriptions of terrorist attacks committed in the context of the Troubles. 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. Magee names the victims, their ages, the families they left behind.

This text is filled to the brim with smart sentences, intelligent ideas about identity, self-determination and representation, and beautiful prose (including what Christoph Ransmayr would call "flying sentences"). The ending is quietly devastating, and the whole thing is just extremely well done. If this doesn't get nominated for the Booker, I will be SHOOK.

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A beautifully written novel about, art, language, colonialism,history, isolation, loneliness, violence, the sea, identity, expectations, cruelty, theft of ideas, creativity and so much more. I found myself drawn into the story from the start, I loved how it was done, the thoughts of individual characters flow in and out. Set on a rugged island off the coast of Ireland where Gaelic is still spoken and the locals live a harsh life particularly in winter, this summer two cottages have been rented out to visitors, an English artist who says he wants to paint the cliffs and a Frenchman who is studying the language and how it has changed across the generations and with contact with the English. Interspersed between the main story are short vignettes that read like news reports of the death and violence happening in Northern Ireland (it’s set in 1979). It is clear what colonialism has taken from the people and what continues to be taken. James, a teenager on the island doesn’t want to be a fisherman, and has artistic talent which the English artist encourages. How he treats the boy at the end is shocking yet not unexpected. I thought this book was quite a brilliant read, and didn’t want to put it down.

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Lloyd is an English painter who has come to a small Irish enclave (too small to be called a town) to spend the summer painting. Soon Masson also arrives He is a French/Algerian linguist who is a repeat visitor to this community to research Gaelic. These two outsiders immediately clash and feel that they have paid for exclusive rights to spend the summer. The Irish residents aren’t naive and know that they are being patronized and exploited, but they need the rent to supplement their incomes. The exception is teenaged James, who hates fishing and wants something more than being the designated rabbit hunter. (You might want to avoid this book if you don’t want to read repeated instances of rabbits having their brains bashed out.) James is enthralled by Lloyd and his painting, and he is also very trusting. After Lloyd gives him art supplies and some direction, James develops a natural talent for painting.

The structure of this book is challenging. There are no quotation marks and there are a lot of stream of consciousness monologues. Although I also had the ebook I relied on the narrator of the audiobook to do all of the heavy lifting for me. He did an excellent job, but I felt a little sorry for him. The book takes place during The Troubles in Ireland. Interspersed in the book are various news accounts of violent attacks in Ireland. There are also accounts of the French colonization of Algeria. All of this seemed a little heavy handed. I think that we might have seen the parallels without so much detail. The ending of the book is realistic, but so sad.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

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4.5 stars, rounded up. I'd be extremely surprised if this didn't make the 2022 Booker longlist, and maybe even the shortlist.

Magee has succeeded admirably in painting a lyrical and precise portrait of a tiny community of Gaelic-speakers living on a small rocky island off the west coast of Ireland in 1979, at the height of the Troubles. The Colony accumulates realistic scenes of domestic life-- simple meals, cliffside walks, teatime conversations-- over the course of a summer.

Beyond these narrative pleasures and deft character studies, it's also a subtle allegory of the deep cultural scars left by British colonialism, and the illusory binary of tradition and modernity. Magee slowly ratchets up the tension and menace, interspersing narrative chapters of island-based events with terse j0urnalistic accounts of the escalating death toll of sectarian conflict, whose waves ultimately lap up against the island's shores by the novel's end.

The locals are alternatively bemused by and resentful of two outsiders, who embody two different variants of colonialist objectification and the imperial gaze. Lloyd, a middlingly-talented and middle-aged English landscape painter, arrives on the island as a figure of ridicule, seeking a truly authentic experience of windswept cliffs and pristine solitude. He lodges in the home of a young window, Mairéad, who becomes his muse, the Gaelic equivalent of Gauguin's Tahitian maidens. Lloyd nurtures the artistic ambitions of her teenaged son James, absorbing and exploiting his painted images, as the pupil quickly surpasses his master's achievements.

Jean-Pierre Masson, a Parisian linguist, also arrives on the island for his fifth summer of fieldwork, seeking to preserve the authenticity of Gaelic from the encroaching influence of English, which Lloyd has thoughtlessly brought with him, contaminating his best-laid experiments. But JP's motives are just as impure as Lloyd's, and he projects his fantasies of linguistic purity upon the villagers, especially Mairéad's monoglot mother and grandmother; and he treats Mairéad like his concubine. In flashbacks, it's revealed that he himself is post-colonial: his mother was Algerian, married to a French soldier, and that the islanders' Gaelic is an analogue for the Arabic he never learned to speak.

By the novel's halfway point, Magee channels the characters' inner lives through extended soliloquies, expressing all of the desires they can't bring themselves to speak out loud. The only flaw is the novel's oblique and muffled conclusion, when the narrative tension mysteriously dissipates, but I was thoroughly transfixed by this novel until the very end. Very highly recommended.

Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Netgalley for sharing an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

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The book begins with a vivid telling of Mr. Lloyd (an English painter in the 1970's) traveling by curragh from England to a small island off Ireland. The journey is hair-raising as Lloyd and his two rowers cross very rough seas while he tries to protect his art materials and tools. Lloyd has insisted that he be taken to the island in an ancient, handmade vessel despite the availability of modern ships. He has rented a modest cottage on the island so he can paint a span of cliffs that he once saw from a distance; an integral part of this plan involves living as pre-modern an existence as he can for the summer. There are few people living on this island which is only three miles long and half that wide, and they are all Irish-speaking. The young people also speak English, and many of them assume they will leave the island if they are to have any sort of future. Jobs are few and education is minimal on this island.
One of the many odd things about Lloyd is that he envisions the painting of the cliffs as the making of his masterpiece(s) although his style is described as very ordinary and derivative. He has difficulty socializing and usually eats silently at the family cottage where he has paid for his meals. A teenaged boy, James, whose mother and grandmother provide lodging and meals for the very few visitors, is a natural artistic genius. He has never had the means or instruction to develop his gift so he latches onto Lloyd who shares supplies with him.
Another character (who is very hostile toward Lloyd) is JP Masson a French-Algerian linguist who insists that everyone speak only Irish during meals, which presents a major problem for Lloyd.
At this point the book began to feel more like a dystopian novel to me than a character study or plot-driven book. The characters become more symbolic than real, believable people in my opinion. And adding to this effect, between chapters there are factual vignettes of deaths suffered in the violence in northern Ireland during this period. Lloyd seems to come to Ireland not out of a deep love for the country, its people, and its culture but solely out of a vague fixation on painting particular cliffs. Masson seems to represent a person torn apart by embodying two nationalities, languages, and cultures...and he then adopts a third country and passionately opposes any modernity being introduced to this little island. Lloyd has a laissez-faire attitude about the question of should the Irish stay or should they go...and which language should they speak.
There is a sense of fragmentation throughout the book. Relationships and marriages are broken, and neither individuals nor countries nor subpopulations within countries can live in harmony. The book ends with several betrayals, further underlying the futility of trying to connect. The title refers both to a community of artists that never materializes in this novel, and to the playing out of the ruination and unhealable schisms caused by colonialism.
I'm sure many readers will find this book deep but for me it read more as an allegory than a novel about real human beings.

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On the surface, this is a story about a remote island with several familiar story elements: an apprentice and his master, a love triangle of sorts, a generational family story, and the coming of age of an island boy. But quickly we see that The Colony is about so much more: it’s about power, manipulation, betrayal, and the violent legacy of colonialism. It’s also about the smell of fish and paint and linseed oil, the symphony of seagulls, Ireland, a mother tongue, Gauguin and Manet, knitted jumpers, dead rabbits, three drowned men, and the light between the waves.

The novel begins with the arrival of an English artist and a French linguist on a small Irish island during the summer of 1979. Mr. Lloyd, a landscape painter, worries about his waning talent and success. Jean-Pierre Masson, a French-Algerian linguist on the rise who has lost his own Arabic mother tongue, worries about Lloyd’s influence and lectures the islanders on colonial corruption of their language and lives. The artist and the linguist clash and argue; the locals leave them alone and view both outsiders with skepticism. But as the summer passes, the islanders find themselves seduced by their guests’ promises, especially young James Gillan who is longing for a different life away from the island.

The books is beautifully and creatively written: the sparse dialogue between Lloyd and James is contrasted with the poetic beauty of their internal monologues on nature and art, often using a narrative voice which slips into and zooms out of the character within the same sentence. Equally slippery are the bulletin-like news vignettes of bombings and shootings in Northern Ireland which first punctuate the story as shocking interruptions, but then slowly seep into the minds and lives of the islanders as the sectarian violence in Belfast and beyond escalates.

This is a fascinating, unsettling, brilliant, and poetic novel, which I highly recommend. I really hope to see this powerful novel on a few award lists, including the Booker Prize longlist.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC.

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