Mind Picker: The Colony

That’s what artists do, James. Take from each other, learn from each other. That’s what we’re doing here, in our little artist’s colony.

James fingered his cup. It doesn’t seem right, Mr Lloyd.

The Colony is a sneakily allegorical exploration of colonisation and its enduring effects on colonised people; it’s sneaky because it seems quiet and measured, but this is a book that roars beneath the surface. Set on a tiny island off the west coast of Ireland in 1979, author Audrey Magee imagines this last outpost of monolingual Irish speakers under existential threat from two summer lodgers: an English painter (who fancies himself a modern day Gaugin; re-interpretive, not derivative, surely) and a French linguist (on the final year of the research that will be the basis of his PhD thesis, he resents the presence of an English speaker influencing his subjects’ virgin syntax). Throughout, Magee inserts impassive accounts of lethal attacks between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland — 1979 was the height of violence in The Troubles, culminating in the bombing deaths of Lord Mountbatten and his family while on a sea cruise — and while at first these interludes may seem to be background colour, they eventually make clear that the few dozen inhabitants of this unnamed island consider themselves to be thoroughly Irish; fully developed adults with opinions and self-awareness of their position in the world (hardly the “primitives” who would need an Englishman and a Frenchman to argue over what’s best for them.) This works as both historical fiction and as an exploration of an enduringly thorny topic, and I loved the whole thing. Rounding up to five stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

self-portrait: at sea
I’d like you to sing, he said.
We don’t sing, Mr Lloyd.
But I need something to focus on. Counting or singing.
Not in this boat.
I read in a book that you people always sing while rowing.
Not a very good book then, is it, Mr Lloyd?
I came here because of it.
The boatman looked past Lloyd, at the land behind.
You need a better book, Mr Lloyd.
It seems that I do.

Mr Lloyd is a middle-aged traditionalist landscape artist — desperate to make himself relevant in the modernist London art scene alongside Auerbach, Bacon, and Freud — and he has an idea of how his ideal undiscovered country will look, and the money to pursue his follies (money enough to pay a couple of fishermen to row him across the Atlantic for nine hours in a flat-bottomed canvas currach because he saw the scene in a book once). There’s a whiff of flag-planting about Lloyd, but as the above early exchange between Lloyd and his hosts demonstrates, it will be hard for this Englishman to get the better of the Irish in a debate. Lloyd does seem to be a serious and talented painter, and as the summer progresses and fifteen-year-old local, James, begins to paint alongside him, Lloyd becomes more humanised and integrated with the community.

One of the great delights of The Colony is the seamless interior monologuing that passes from character to character. Lloyd demonstrates what a twit he is when titling every scene he looks upon as though it is already painted (as above: self-portrait: at sea, elsewhere: island scene: mass on sunday or self-portrait: becoming an islander), and there’s something very self-consciously Proustian about the French linguist’s stream-of-consciousness (and particularly as his mother was an Algerian Arab and his father an abusive French soldier who demonstrated against his wife’s body the violence of French colonialism; Jean-Pierre might be on the island as a saviour of the Irish language, but he wants you to know that he’s 100% French):

An Englishman. In this, my final summer. He shouldn’t be here, not on this island, not in this yard, for this is my place, my retreat, where I sit, alone, at the end of the day, hidden by the whitewashed walls from the rest of the island, from the islanders, the evening sun on my closed eyes as I dissect the day’s language and analyse the phrases and inflections, the intonations and borrowings, hunting for influences of English, for traces of that foreign language creeping onto the island, into the houses, into the mouths and onto the tongues of the islanders, tracking those tiny utterances that signal change, marking the beginning of the end of Irish on the island, these thoughts, this knowledge, encased and protected by the smallness and stillness of this yard, with only the birds to hear my mutterings, as it was in the wood-panelled courtyard of my grandmother’s house on the edge of the village far from the town, further still from the city, sitting on my own at the circular table cast of iron, under the willow tree, the birds above me, around me, witness to my childhood mumblings on those early summer mornings, my parents, my aunts, my cousins still sleeping, my grandmother in the kitchen, humming as she prepared my hot chocolate, a freshness and softness to her movements that would later, as the day aged, become irritated and hardened, but then, in the early morning, as I sat outside, alone in the courtyard, as she stirred the chocolate powder into the warm milk, she was gentle, smiling as she set the blue and white bowl in front of me, smiling still when she returned from the kitchen with a basket of bread, with butter and jam, with a teaspoon, a knife, a napkin and a glass of water, setting them all in front of me, ruffling my hair, telling me how happy she was to see me again, to have me to stay, and I, aware even then of the transience of our intimacy, kissed her hand, her skin not yet old but beginning to grow old, holding her until she pulled away and returned to the kitchen, her slippers slapping the tiled floor still to be warmed by the day’s sun, leaving me alone again with the birds. As it had been here. As I had been here. Alone, in this yard, until now, until the arrival of this Englishman with his English talk. Masson lifted the brush and slammed it against the concrete. Damn you, Lloyd. This yard is mine.

As an added bonus: as Jean-Pierre begins writing the intro to his dissertation while on the island, The Colony contains a very succinct history of the English colonisation of Ireland and how it led to the attacks that everyone is hearing about on the radio when they gather for evening meals. Lloyd and Jean-Pierre debate the effects of colonisation — Lloyd taking the view that there’s not much tragic about languages dying out if it improves a people’s economic situation — and even though Jean-Pierre (despite the burden of having rejected his mother’s cultural heritage) thinks of himself as the island’s lone cultural champion, both of these men fantasise about their work generating fame and fortune and drawing newspaper and film crews to this tiny outpost.

Imagine that, said Mairéad. A Frenchman and an Englishman squabbling over our turf.
They’ve been squabbling over our turf for centuries, said Francis.
I suppose they have.

Yet while the Frenchman and the Englishman have their great debates about the island’s future, it’s obvious that the islanders aren’t naive about their situation: with young people moving away and too few older folks remaining to support a traditional way of life, their community will need to evolve into something else. Mairéad (James’ widowed mother) dials the common experience down to the personal: All of the men she meets want to protect or possess her, and while this or that one might believe he is taking advantage, Mairéad is (like the islanders as a whole) a fully developed, mature person who has her own desires and motivations; no one need feel sorry for Mairéad. Even so, James will end up being used in a way that demonstrates the worst of colonial impulses (manipulation, exploitation, appropriation), and ultimately, Magee says something very powerful and necessary about how the effects of colonialism linger in the psyches of people on each side of the power divide. Simply a remarkable example of a well-written book with something important to say.