A Tale of Well-Meaning Visitors Reflects a Colonial Legacy

THE COLONY
By Audrey Magee

A middle-aged English artist arrives on an island off the west coast of Eire in the summertime of 1979. Lloyd, the protagonist of Audrey Magee’s new novel, “The Colony,” hopes to revitalize his profession by spending three months portray the panorama and its handful of inhabitants. In his optimistic moments, he imagines making work that may get him talked about because the “Gauguin of the Northern Hemisphere,” doing for this rocky Atlantic outpost what the French primitivist as soon as did for Tahiti. On the very least, he’ll please the “half-wife” he has left behind in London who doubles as his seller and has just lately taken to telling him that his work are by-product and boring.

After a lurching, punishing crossing from the mainland in a currach (he finds the motorboat inauthentic), Lloyd is dismayed to find that he’s not the one customer with designs on the island. A French linguist who goes by JP has returned for a fifth summer time to finish his longitudinal examine on the inhabitants’ use of Gaelic, fieldwork that he hopes will get him a Ph.D. JP berates the youthful inhabitants for often lapsing into English and mourns the truth that so many have already emigrated to Dublin, London and Boston.

Magee tracks her two unlikable protagonists as they ransack the island for their very own ends, every believing that they’ve its greatest pursuits at coronary heart. To underscore that that is, in microcosm, the story of England’s historical and persevering with colonization of Eire, Magee drops in information bulletins from the mainland that chart 1979’s summer time of sectarian violence between the Provisional I.R.A. and Protestant paramilitaries. Tit-for-tat assassinations change into the background temper music, with the sickening crescendo arriving on the finish of August, when Lord Mountbatten, the queen’s cousin and a warfare hero, is blown up together with his household whereas on vacation in County Sligo.

Magee retains a cool distance from these atrocities, simply as she did in her earlier novel, “The Enterprise,” set in Nazi Germany. Her voice is spare to the purpose of austerity, with paragraphs typically not more than a phrase lengthy and brief traces spilling vertically down the web page in what appears, at first look, like poetry. This limber type permits Magee to plunge into the inside lives of her characters, who’ve lots to say to themselves in regards to the energy struggles taking part in out earlier than them, even when they have a tendency to maintain quiet in firm.

Most notable is Mairéad, the gorgeous younger “widow island girl,” who has misplaced her quick household in a fishing catastrophe and now finds herself scrapped over by the remaining males on the island — JP (with whom she is sleeping), Lloyd (for whom she is posing bare) and Francis (her late husband’s brother, who approves of neither). Beneath the affect of Lloyd, Mairéad’s teenage son, James — whom JP insists on renaming Séamus — is starting to discover portray for himself. The boy’s naïf type is a revelation to Lloyd, pointing to fertile instructions by which his personal work would possibly journey. Questions of cultural appropriation come up as James involves resent the best way by which “Mr. Lloyd” (we by no means be taught his Christian identify) has “stolen” his artwork.

“The Colony” is a novel of concepts and at occasions these concepts can really feel schematic, particularly when JP is given a again story for his linguistic zealotry that pulls on France’s historic occupation of Algeria. Typically, although, Magee builds her world with a wealthy particularity that by no means defaults to the off-the-peg lyricism that always marks novels about rural Eire. The documentary interludes, in the meantime, anchor the story within the brutal political realities of Eire throughout a fateful summer time, whereas appearing as a reminder of imperialism’s broader legacy all over the world.