The Colony: Audrey Magee

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And watching as the men unload the fragile canvas currach and lift it out of the water to store it safe from the fierce waves. 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. For a relatively short novel, The Colony offers several important themes such as the sense of national identity preserved in a language, hatred having its roots in history and religion or the need to cut off oneself from life lived previous generations. This was one of the books that was being tipped most widely before this year's Booker longlist was announced, so I was very keen to read it, and for the most part it lived up to the high expectations which that created. A lyrical, rich, and emotionally powerful novel. The Colony comes alive like a brooding and beautiful canvas painted off the Irish coast.”

The novel begins with an English artist – Mr Lloyd – travelling to a remote Irish Gaelic-speaking island off the West coast of Ireland where he intends to paint. Ostensibly he is travelling to paint the cliffs but he is also interested in all aspects of the traditional life of the islanders, starting by insisting on being rowed across the island in line with pictures he has seen in a book – and seems keen to emulate Gauguin and his work based around Noa Noa. and the contrast to the Proustian recollections of his colonial rival Masson, a Frenchman, determined to save the islanders' language and their heritage, even if that isn't what they want, and hiding a secret of his own (that he betrayed his own linguistic and cultural heritage);As you can probably tell by now, The Colony serves up a peculiar combination of the oblique and the overt. 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.

If we recall our Anglo-Irish history, we know that this particular year of the Troubles reached a bloody climax on 27 August, when the IRA bombed the fishing boat of Lord Mountbatten in the bay at Mullaghmore, County Sligo, killing or seriously injuring everyone aboard; on the same day, 18 British soldiers were killed by an IRA bomb at Warrenpoint, County Down. Catastrophe looms. Are these short inter-chapters offered merely as an oblique counterpoint to the story of Lloyd and the island? Or will the two strands of the novel in some way collide?Writing in term time — and gorging on other people’s work during the school holidays, Magee has been writing The Colony since 2015. The inclusion of Keating in Orpen's painting echoes Lloyd's Gauguin painting too. He added James into his scenario, wearing his hand-knit jumper—but carrying a brace of rabbits and not the paint brushes that James had requested be included. James's rendering is very much from Lloyd's perspective. He is fixed forever as an island boy and not as an artist. How does it feel to be longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022, and what would winning the Booker mean to you?