The Colony: Audrey Magee

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Austere and stark . . . a story about language and identity, about art, oppression, freedom and colonialism. The Colony is a novel about big, important things.' Financial Times

He stood up and brushed the dust and dirt from his trousers. The boatman lifted his arm, offering his hand. Covid came at an ideal time. “When it happened, I was at a point where I desperately needed more time. It was traumatic for the kids, but for me, as a writer, it was a time to finish and ferment the novel — a great time, because you were able to retreat from the world even further.” 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.It was such fun to have Lloyd and Masson — two bulls in a field, and also as Masson comes with his intellect, I was able to have the discussion about the Irish language — does it matter if it’s preserved? It takes an outsider, I believe, to have this conversation.” In 1979 an English artist seeks to re-invigorate his painting (and his life overall) by visiting an island off the Atlantic coast of Ireland where life is still firmly rooted in the past, but where the reality of the world on the mainland encroaches in fits and starts. Residents, particularly the young, face the question of whether to stay or leave. I'm feeling very much at odds with my GR friends over this year's Booker long-list: I seem to like best the books others are ambiguous about ( Trust, After Sappho) and actively dislike the books tipped for Booker stardom which nearly all my friends are raving about, including this one.

Now make the room an island, three miles long and one and one-half miles wide. Populate it. Give it ancestry and history. And human needs. Put it near The Troubles. So not quite a blank canvas when the Englishman comes, an artist in a slump. I mainly write directly onto the computer but I always have notebooks and scraps of paper to my right side so that I can write things out in longhand or draw. I write in longhand to understand the rhythm of the language; I draw to understand the space around a moment. My plot lines are skeletal, allowing the characters to respond to the moment they are in, and the novel to unfold as it wishes. I pare and edit as I write, always distilling, hunting for the essence of a moment or an interaction. The two take an immediate dislike to each other – JP due to Mr Lloyd’s corrupting influence on the island’s linguistic evolution, Mr Lloyd due to JP’s disruption of the peace he needs for his art – while both compete in different ways for the affection of the attractive Mairéad. 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. 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.despite there being no metric sense or rhythm. And alternate chapters of news items about the daily killings of the 'Troubles' which, gradually and minimally, intersect with the tiny island family.