In a small, sparsely-populated and remote Irish island, an ageing population still speaks their native Irish language, but they are gradually dying out. This phenomenon is observed through the eyes of one of the youngest remaining island residents, James, who prefers to speak English and be addressed by his English name rather than his Irish name, Seamus. Two foreigners separately travel to this island for their own purposes. One of them is an irascible London artist, Lloyd, who wishes to create paintings that capture the island's beauty and its inhabitants in order to establish himself as the “Gauguin of the North”. The other is Frenchman Jean-Pierre, a linguist who has been making excursions to the island for many years to record how the “purity” of the spoken language is slowly changing with the increasing influence of English. He wants to write an account of whether true Irishness can be preserved and is perturbed by Lloyd's presence, which he feels is interfering with his research.

The island's residents grudgingly tolerate both men as paying guests who bring in much-needed capital since the native fishing industry is dying out. James, whose father and grandfather both died at sea, finds himself caught between two worlds and with limited opportunities. He wishes to avoid the family tradition of becoming a fisherman and finds a new passion in painting from his interactions with Lloyd. However, he is repulsed by Jean-Pierre's attempts to get him to use his Irish name and preserve his native language. The tension between these characters raises profound questions about the meaning of national identity and who determines the fate of individuals and distinct groups of people.

The novel is a slow-burning drama that builds to a larger commentary on notions of national purity and colonialism. The author, Magee, approaches this issue on a human level, as she did in her powerful debut novel, “The Undertaking,” which dealt with different circumstances. The heart of the story lies with James, whose experiences reveal the complexities of individual agency and the constraints placed upon him by larger societal forces. The character's development and his relationship with Lloyd, who recognizes his artistic talent and offers him a path out of his limited circumstances, are moving and poignant.

The novel also features short accounts of victims of The Troubles, which serve as a sobering reminder of the ordinary individuals and families who suffer as issues related to Irishness and colonization are fought over violently. The war touches even the remote outpost of this island, where Lloyd and Jean-Pierre, despite their perceived benign intentions, have a pernicious impact on James and his community. The writing is finely tuned, with dialogue that fully brings to life these characters and their points of difference. Overall, the novel is haunting and impactful, evoking a sense of tragedy that resonates deeply with readers.

The premise sounded interesting, but the story moved so slowly and I felt lost (not in an intriguing way) for too long to build a connection and continue with the story. I couldn't finish.

Thank you Net Galley for an audio copy of The Colony by Audrey Magee. This book was underwhelming for me. I did not feel engaged.

*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.

This gorgeously written, though emotionally distant, novel zooms in on isolated Gaelic island off the coast of Ireland to explore sweeping themes of colonization, appropriation, and loss. Though the narration I listened to as a gift from Netgalley and Dreamscape Media was excellent and the author's command of the language glorious, the story itself was somewhat dragged out, which detracted from my overall enjoyment.

Between longer chapters in which we inhabit the stream-of-consciousness thoughts of several characters are mini-chapters that recount the dry facts of various IRA bombings taking place in the late 1970s. The "Troubles" in Northern Island are separate from the lives of the people on the island and presented as such, but they are slowly moving closer, and we can feel both the violence and the loss of the islanders' lifestyle encroaching.

The plot, such as it is, involves two arrogant men who come to the island to carry out their own creative projects: an artist, who we learn is married to a woman who does not believe in his talent, and an academic who is writing his dissertation on the Gaelic language and its maintenance on the island. The artist dreams of being the "Gaugin of the North." (And here I refer to a 2019 essay by Michael Glover in Hyperallergic, in which he says of a Gaugin exhibit: "It is difficult not to walk out of the National Gallery’s Gauguin Portraits without harboring feelings of distaste for and even revulsion towards this puffed-up elf of a Frenchman. Gauguin, on the evidence of this show, was a monstrous sexual predator, a near-perfect embodiment of the malignly lubricious male gaze, a man from France who took himself off to the French colonies, and not only sexually exploited many of the women he saw there, but also did his best to exoticize them in his paintings, to lay them out sideways, scantily clothed, in dreamy readiness for everyone-knows-what, and surround them with inscrutable ancestral gewgaws and snatches of mumbo-jumbo writing, all in the service of creating a seductively alluring species of art for mock-serious-minded, top-hatted collectors in Paris.") Both the artist and the academic in The Colony embody Gaugin's approach to "the natives," eroticizing them, taking their lives and feelings for granted, and imagining their magical culture needs to be preserved by outsiders while at the same time invading it with their presence. Both men are loathsome.

The two sympathetic characters in the story are a mother and child: a woman whose husband, father and brother all perished in a shipwreck and her teen son (Seamus/James), who is unsurprisingly determined not to be a fisherman given the fate of his father, grandfather and uncle. The woman, despite being wise and knowing, is used by all the men in the story, upon whom she is dependent for support of various kinds. Her husband's brother is sleeping with her, as is the academic who is paying to rent a room from her, while the artist is literally objectifying her in his paintings. The teen son, it turns out, has a raw artistic brilliance that is developed under the artist's tutelage. The artist promises the boy that if he waits on him hand and foot while he is there, he will bring the boy back to England with him and send him to art school and host the boy's paintings alongside his own in a gallery exhibition.

Despite my feeling the story dragged and had barely any plot, I found the ending emotionally devastating and have been haunted by the way it shows us that colonization of people's souls can be as damaging as the colonization of their lands. An excellent work of literary historical fiction.

An interesting look at the impact of colonialism on a small unnamed island of the Atlantic coast of Ireland. In 1979, an artist and later a linguist travel to the island for their own purposes, not realizing the impact their visit will have on the sheltered inhabitants of the island. Interspersed throughout the narrative are short, emotionless stories of murders committed by members of the IRA during this time, which emphasizes how separate the island is from the rest of the country. I listened to the audiobook, which I feel enhanced the story by providing the pronunciation of the Irish names and locations. The narrator was excellent.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for an advance copy of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book. I’m not sure what to make of this book, and I’m not sure I would recommend it to a friend. The setting was interesting, but the plot didn’t grab me. The audio production made it challenging, I prefer a more stable volume because I listen with earbuds. I don’t blast the volume, so I kept having to rewind to catch lower volume portions. Narrowing the volume variation would be helpful.

If I can't get into a book within 25% I have to just give up. I found the story boring.and very monotonous as was the narrator"s voice. I see after glancing at other reader's reviews I'm at the other end of the spectrum. Thank you Netgalley for giving me the chance to listen to the audiobook in exchange for my honest review.

The Colony was…..was…..well I don’t know actually. There was an island and a small group living on it. This strange telling presented a picture of seclusion and religious unrest against past transgressions.
It made me think a lot about artists and how strange their lives must be. Finding inspiration and or success. I thought it well written but a little odd.
I sit here now still wondering all the meanings of this story.
I chose to listen to this book on audio and enjoyed Stephen Hogan as the narrator. I highly recommend listening to this.
Thanks Dreamscape Media via Netgalley.

What did I just read? I'm not sure. There is more to The Colony than meets the eyes. I'm not certain that rereading will clarify what I didn't grasp.

I'm not repeating the synopsis or giving spoilers. This is a work of fiction, historical (I love) Ireland, which overall I'm unfamiliar with. I do remember the IRA dominating nightly news in real life.

I had the audiobook, and thought the narrator did a really good job. I was able to focus rightly on the characters. I had problems with portions of the dialogue that had me border on nervosing. Quick yes/no, she said/he said conversations that were story oriented but didn't come off smoothly in the audio setting. I did have to use ear buds. The volume was up and down: whisper (almost too low to hear), normal and loud throughout. Thus, making it impossible for me to play out loud or do anything other than quietly listen.

The F-words came out of no where towards the end. Why?

This is a story that I would like a pod cast on or a summary of it broken down. The last line in the book made me question if I truly grasped any of the author's intentions, and I really want the total experience.

The book started slow, built itself to crest and smolder. 3.5 stars and not rounding up.

Thank you NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for accepting my request to read and review The Colony.

Thank you to Dreamscape Media and NetGalley for the ALC in return for my honest review.

The description and the premise attracted me to this book. The narrator was good but, unfortunately I couldn’t finish it. I felt that it was slow and I was hoping for the pace to pick up. I made it 30%. Maybe this would be better read than listened too.

Thank you to the publishers, author and NetGalley for the free copy of this audio book.

I'm not sure what I thought I was getting into when I started this but what I ended up with was a very though provoking read! The writing style was interesting, and I surprisingly rather enjoyed the stream of consciousness writing that is found throughout this more than I expected. The narrator was good for this as well.

I read this on the page as well as with an audio arc from Netgalley, and I must say, the audio production was sublime for this one. What a fantastic narrator.

This is a simple story with not that much of a plot. But that is very deceptive. A British painter comes to a remote Irish island in, from what I can tell, some months in 1979, to paint the cliffs. At the same time, a French academic writing a book on the dying language spoken there is the only other outsider. A grandmother, her daughter, her son, and the porter are the predominant cast. The mere presence of the Englishmen, solitary as he may perceive himself, begins to upset the dynamics and patterns of the people—including the study the Frenchmen is conducting.

Much of the prose is interior, which mimics the thinking of the Frenchmen and Englishmen for most of the book. Stream-of-consciousness that elucidates their history while showcasing their either lateral jumps in thought process or else emotional contusions run aground in long paragraphs that feel like worries and rants and the chunks of time that they are. It’s very personality-heavy prose work, that drips off the lines.

In a very subtle way, the weeks go by, and seemingly not that much happens. Only the events will alter some of peoples’ futures forever. Who and how that happens is a byproduct of the colonization and thinking ingrained from root to stem. Who is agitated and why, and what they do about it. Who has compassion for what, versus decried, spin-on, and attacked. And the responsibility for actions continually eschewed and replicated.

It’s a fascinating character study and a chilling tale. Especially as tensions grow with the interspersed news reports being relayed to the reader, while the characters comment on them often as well, especially later on. Absolutely brilliant bit of fiction.

I didn’t know what I was getting when I decided to listen to Audrey Magee’s The Colony and, to be honest, I was leery, having read “somewhere” that her prose is lyrical and breaks down, in a good way I assume was suggested, from the weight of her weighty themes. What I listened to, however, was less experimental, but more compelling and thought-provoking. Because listening doesn’t come as easily as silent reading, I had to work hard to follow the events and understand the characters. Stephen Hogan’s narration was excellent, clear, articulated, and with a particularly engaging gruffness to Magee’s Englishman painter, known only as Mr. Lloyd.

While its ideas were complex and thought-provoking, the novel was cold. I didn’t like any of the characters except for one and remained emotionally unengaged. Which is all right, it’s a kind of literary experience which I can appreciate if it makes me think. And The Colony makes you think. It opens with Mr. Lloyd’s arrival on the island by curragh, which he insists on for the authenticity of the experience. *eye roll* The islanders are sarcastic, sardonic, and laconic, and Lloyd, well, he’s curmudgeonly and a classist snob. His thoughts, (often echoing the artist Magee wants us to consider as Lloyd’s painterly double, racist and genius, Gauguin) show a struggle with an attempt to capture the island’s facets: landscape, seascape, people-scape. The islanders, on the other hand, asked him not to paint them and he breaks his word within days of his arrival…because that’s what the exploiter does, break words and suit his needs, his art, his “vision”.

Lloyd’s arrival is followed by Jean-Pierre Masson’s, a linguist who has been coming to the island for years, working on his dissertation honouring and preserving Gaelic, the local language. The intrusion of these two men made me think about one of the first principals of my sole anthropology course (it was of religion), the notion that anyone who enters a culture, by virtue of their mere presence, no matter how unobtrusive, will inevitably change it. Lloyd is too self-absorbed to be bothered by this and Masson too much of a romanticizing idiot to be more than irony. They each have their own version of the island to exploit, and at core, are mainly interested in furthering their careers; the islanders, who are not the monolith I seem to suggest thus far, are a mix of what we find in any culture: like Aeneas, carrying the past and working to living their lives as independent beings.

Magee uses the “life-boat” convention to shape her narrative: take a group of people, add tension and conflict because of personality and circumstance and let them interact in a wildly beautiful, circumscribed context. A tale at least as old as Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The question Golding and Magee pose: what of the outside world, what is happening “out there” that can foil, reflect, or contrast with the island? Golding destroys the known world via atomic annihilation and leaves his “boys” adrift to reenact ancient, inherent cruelties.

Magee too wants to account for history: she alternates chapters about the island’s people, guests, and events with Northern Ireland’s 1979 “troubles”. She juxtaposes historical time against the island’s timelessness, current events, present in the news cycle, with what underlies them: the colony and its exploiters. The island is, in effect, both past and present, but not current. (I’m still uncertain if this works and can point to Binet’s HHhH greater interweaving of history and fiction as a more successful, elegant attempt? Maybe because Binet solves the problem, which neither Golding or Magee do, by creating that self-deprecating first-person narrator? Golding and Magee opt for the omniscient third-person and a separation of history and fiction. Binet’s is the more successful attempt because he posits the idea that they are too alike, that is, historiography and novel-writing, to be placed “outside” fictive events and character. I leave this parenthetical because I’m not sure of it yet, but it’s food for thought.)

What succeeds is Magee’s characterization. Though Lloyd is not likeable, he is compelling: his obsession with capturing the island’s flora and fauna, rock-face, sea, animals, eventually the islanders. His ruminations about his shifting role in this landscape, often exclamatory statements (“Self portrait: going native” he muses to start, more *eye rolling* from me) envisioned as would-be self-portraits. What makes him near likeability, though never quite, are his meditations on Rembrandt, the great Dutch interior painters, and then, the lapses into angry comparison, his resentment of Freud’s and Bacon’s successes. (I chuckled.) For Lloyd is a representational artist and recognizes his passé style, but persists, modeling himself on Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Gauguin.

Masson’s story, on the other hand, hit close to home for me. As a Quebecer, language is a fraught issue: we size each other up, francophone? anglophone? allophone? negotiate everyday interactions with side-eyes that anywhere else in N. America would remain neutral exchanges. And our history is layered: as English dominated French, as French now dominates English and as both practised a heinous erasure on Indigenous peoples and their languages, First Nations and Inuit.

Masson’s back-story makes him a hypocrite: he is a scholar who wants to establish his career on his championing of Gaelic, a “dying” language to be preserved, he argues, for its beauty. He hates the Englishman Lloyd and what his kind has wrought in Ireland and yet, he, I think, compensates for his own “linguistic” failures by upholding Gaelic. For Masson is not “wholly” French, thanks to his Algerian mother, who tried, through his childhood, to see him learn classical Arabic. His father, a racist who met his mother fighting in Algeria, is no better than the English colonizers and France is certainly no model of tolerance and inclusion in North Africa. As a child, Mason may not have “sided” with his father, but he resisted his mother’s attempts, wanting only to be French, to speak French, to get as far away from the Arabic community his mother took him to weekly as he could get.

Both of these middle-aged men, carrying their countries’ exploitative natures, have their true natures revealed in their interactions with James, the son of the women who rent their cottages to the strangers, feed and clean up after them. Masson is often annoyed with James for not wanting to become a fisherman like his father, grandfather, and generations of island men before them, annoyed because James insists on speaking English. Masson wants James to stay put, stay on, and become petrified in the past, so that James can enact loyalties he Masson could not. James has other ideas, other aspirations. James wants to be an artist and asks Mr. Lloyd to help him, teach him. In the end, in a final irony, Mr. Lloyd’s magnus opus is mere pastiche and the islanders, victims of Lloyd’s and Masson’s betrayals? I think not. Magee posits not, by giving them strong sense of selves and agency. I don’t know that I would have made it through Magee’s novel if I read rather than listened to it, but the audiobook format helped me appreciate it and I would recommend it highly.

I am grateful to Dreamscape Media for the opportunity to listen to and review this audiobook, which they provided via Netgalley.

Audrey Magee is a new to me author. I went in not knowing much about the book. This is a new era of historical fiction for me. I know almost nothing about the Irish conflict in the late 70's. This book makes me want to learn more. I enjoyed the narrative about island life and the 2 outsiders. Their conflict and strife was conveyed wonderfully. It was interesting to learn of how these islanders felt about those from England. I liked the ending and thought it was prefect with the tone of the rest of the book. I listened to the audio book and thought the narration was great.

I became aware of The Colony through reviews from my reading buddies, who have very high standards (and rightly so). On the surface, The Colony is a simple story, of an island off the coast of Ireland, with a low population, who still speak Irish, a “dying” language. Two men come to the island for work; Lloyd, an artist wishing to paint the landscapes, and JP, a linguist who has spent the last few years studying the evolution of the Irish language among the island’s inhabitants. Both try to use the island and those who live there for their own personal gain.

But the inhabitants of the island are not “simple” people. They have met with tragedy, and have their own dreams and ambitions. Young James becomes Lloyd’s artist’s apprentice, and his natural talent and keen eye begins to infuriate Lloyd.

The story is also interspersed with brief accounts of violence from The Troubles that were occuring in Ireland in the late seventies. It provides a brutal antithesis to the more subtle toxicity of the island.

I loved this book. I loved the casually hilarious conversations between the island’s inhabitants, Lloyd’s bumbling, uptight mummerings, the infuriating way JP tries to force a dying language on people who are willing to move forward.

The thing that stood out to me, is that by the end of the book, nothing really changes. And that’s okay. The men who were trying to exploit the island for their own gains go back to their “normal” lives, and the inhabitants of the island continue their adequate existence.

Steven Hogan’s performance of this dialogue-rich novel is absolutely perfect. His characterization was faultless. I predict I will be thinking about The Colony for years to come.

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”, The narration was well done.

Magee has pulled off something so rare in literature with this novel; the prose sings; the observations about the complexity of human relationships are revelatory; the novel manages to both be intellectually challenging, and also filled with heart; its scenes feel immediate and visceral, but somehow they are also steeped in deep historical references; that it's a tragedy that manages to also be a testament to human resilience and hope.

The novel at times reads like a stage play to me: there is a lot of dialogue, mixed with interior monologue. This quality of the storytelling makes the novel a perfect fit with Stephen Hogan's incredible narration. I've read the novel as a book-book and also listened to Hogart's narration. They are different, equally magnificent experiences. Hogan gives the characters a voice that at times surprised me--I had 'heard' these people differently when I read it silently--but his interpretations nonetheless delighted me. A really great performance!

I loved this character study of people living on a small island off the coast of Ireland. Magee's writing was calming and beautiful. I really loved when Magee would switch from the interior voice of each character to dialogue between them. A great rainy day read.