A harsh life romanticized, a stark island with light that make a painter marvel, a dying language that a linguist tracks obsessively are the main components of Audrey Magee's The Colony. Set on a small, isolated Irish island as the Troubles heat up in the late 1970s, The Colony is both a portrait of a past way of life and an unstinting look at how people don't change, regardless of where they are and when.
The novel opens with Lloyd, a painter from London, opting to take the more difficult boat trip to the island. This is despite his lack of experience sailing and his admitted disdain for boats. The crossing is as difficult and Lloyd comes off as inept as one can imagine. The islanders find it droll and Lloyd demanding in his wanting to be alone in a house with light that he deems good.
Lloyd is about to admit defeat and slink back off the island. But first, he finally finds a vantage point to see the cliffs as he dreamed of doing:
He looked down. On cliffs. As they were in the book, raw, rugged, violent beauty, the ocean thunderous as it crashed into the rock two hundred feet beneath his knees and hands. He flopped onto his stomach and reached further over the edge, the force of the ocean against the rock reverberating through his flesh, into his bones
beauty
unearthed
unseen
unpainted
worthy
of oils
He laughed
of mildew
rain and cold
of cabbage
potato
and fish that's fried
He stayed on his belly, watching as the setting sun lit the west-facing cliff, a light show to unearth the pinks, reads, oranges, yellows embedded in the rock, colours he had not expected to find so far to the north.
Lloyd is caught as securely as any fish the islanders have harvested.
Just as he is settling in and the islanders are getting used to him, a regular summer visitor arrives. JP is a French linguist who has been studying the Gaelic speakers on the island, tracking any changes to their speech as English creeps in. He is incensed that an Englishman is spending the last summer JP will have on the island, corrupting the Gaelic with his polluting talk.
But even as JP fumes about the Englishman interfering with his work, JP is interfering with the islanders by having a lover on the island. Lloyd has come to paint the cliffs. But he interferes with the islanders by sketching them even after promising he would not. One, the great-grandson of the last woman on the island who only speaks Gaelic, is fascinated by his art materials and by the way he looks in Lloyd's sketches.
The writing is poetical. The way Lloyd's work with his materials, and the way he sees his subjects, is chronicled in loving detail. As in the passage above, it cascades on the page at times, as in free verse. At other times, Lloyd's thumbnail descriptions of his sketches, that will perhaps become paintings, are astute observations of his sense of self.
In between the lyrical passages on the island are more stark passages of both Protestants and Catholics being killed in Ireland. As the violence escalates, the islanders cannot escape hearing of it. They may be isolated, but they are not cut off from the world. The great-grandmother recalls the old days, when they were more on their own:
There was no boat to bring us things or take things away, leaving us on our own for most of the time, dependent on what God, the sea and the land gave us, which suited me well enough for I was happy that way and I had none of this looking over the shoulder to see what was coming in from beyond, wondering what life was like over there, because my view was so limited.
She is speaking of America, but the Troubles are what come in from beyond. Then, just like the tide, they go out again.
The Colony is not the kind of novel in which big events lead to big changes. Instead, it is more like a sharply drawn picture that shows a group of people, as individuals and as a group, during a season of their lives. As such, The Colony is a work of art.
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