The Colony: Audrey Magee

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This is certainly not a new idea (see Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth from 1961), but Magee explores it quite beautifully in the Irish context.

The artist who arrives at the island expects to exploit it for his own ends and leaves after achieving them and destroying hopes of some of the inhabitants. LISA MCINERNEY'The Colony is a brilliant and thoughtfully calibrated commentary about the nature and balance of power. While Lloyd hides away, painting his magnum opus – which draws inspiration from Gauguin (another artist who worked in a colonial, exploitative environment) – the islanders discuss whether they should be worried.

Lines set as verse make us privy to his imagistic cast of mind: “He looked then at the sea / rolling to shore / to rocks / to land / rolling from / white-fringed blue […] self-portrait: preparing for the sea crossing”. Her follow-up, The Colony, set in Magee’s native Ireland, applies much the same technique but now the distancing seems much more at home.

The occasional broken lines of stream-of-consciousness are quite effective, and Magee obviously has a great affection for the history and culture of the book’s setting. Magee's involving and original novel considers questions of imperialism, ownership, power and exploitation on both a grand scale and an intimate one, obliquely and head-on . JP argues uncompromisingly for preserving the language, because it “carries their history, their thinking, their being”, and resists the fact that languages change. It’s a cruel scene, particularly given Lloyd’s earlier lofty dreams of showing “that art is greater than politics.

It is about a Gaelic speaking community on an island off the west coast of Ireland during the Troubles.

Financial Times'A vivid and memorable book about art, land and language, love and sex, youth and age. The 'Dark Rosaleen' poem I mentioned earlier was about Spanish ships coming to aid Rosaleen/Ireland in 1601 in the struggle against English dominance. 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 tries to shake up its material through structural and linguistic devices: interwoven 1st and 3rd person narratives (courtesy of James Joyce?Magee has conveyed the relationship vividly within a tiny cast seemingly marooned from the unfolding Troubles and yet as affected by it as its victims and perpetrators. The underlying theme is the collision between an ancient way of life on a small Irish island and two "incomers," who have their own less than altruistic reasons for visiting the island over one summer in the 1970s. 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. JP, initially confident of his welcome on the Island and in love with language, starts both fluent, wordy and heavily figurative – before over time moving into both a more academic and more suspicious register as the Islanders make it clear he is as guilty of appropriation as Lloyd.

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. Its beautifully realised lament for lost language and cultural sustainability has universal relevance. I plan to comment on your review properly now I’ve read it Jacqui when I can sit properly at my computer … am away at present and am writing this while a passenger in the car.

Not only that, he also makes promises to James, himself an aspiring artist who wants to avoid life as a fisherman at all costs.