The Colony by Audrey Magee
“Better to be an artist, drawing death instead of being death.”
One of the most obvious problems with studying history – any history – is its peoplelessness. There’s rarely room for small stories in the grand arc of historical narrative. One large event inevitably leads to another, providing a safe and organised story for us to ponder from our armchairs. Of course, this is a generalisation – and does a gross disservice to historians. Yet there is no denying the remove we often find ourselves at when learning history. And so, there is a certain fascination and satisfaction when we encounter a deeply human story that is seemingly only peripherally linked to that grand arc of history, and yet, through its subtlety, specificity and awkward, messy humanity provides a perfect access point to the whole.
This was my overall impression after reading Audrey Magee’s excellent novel The Colony (2022). Set in 1979 upon a tiny island off the west coast of Ireland, the book covers surprisingly broad (and shaky) ground. It is a meditation on art, language, culture and memory, and how they may be weaponised; it is a story of the evils of colonialism, as well as the insidious hypocrisy of tradition and convention. Yet it is also, essentially, the story of an English painter (Lloyd) and a French linguist (Jean-Pierre Masson), an Irish widow (Mairéad), and her teenage son James. Lloyd is there for the summer to paint the island’s cliffs in seclusion, with a view to eventual acclaim in London. Masson is completing his five-year study on the Irish language as it is ravaged and rapidly replaced by English. Mairéad lives in emotional limbo as she continues to grieve her long-drowned husband, and the life of freedom on the mainland he promised. While James, who resents his presumed destiny as a fisherman, begins to suspect that his true purpose in life is an artistic one. The Troubles hang as a sinister backdrop behind these people’s stories, but never overshadow them.
This is a novel of vivid images and arresting dialogue. The harsh beauty of the island setting and the guarded passions of its inhabitants are brought to life by Magee’s sympathetic ear for her characters, whether they be Irish, English or French-Algerian. The central conflict of the novel is the power struggle between Lloyd and Masson (or JP, as he likes to be called), two outsiders wishing to make their names through their work on the island. Ironically, it is the young, unschooled, yet deeply gifted James who sees through their worldliness to the narcissism beneath. He observes that Lloyd’s paintings are “turning the island into something it isn’t,” and when Masson insists on calling James by his Irish name Séamus, the boy protests “it’s not your choice, JP.”
However, arrogant and wilfully obtuse as they are, these men are not merely types: “the Frenchman”, “the Englishman”, “the university man”, “the artist.” Magee does toy with the tension and comedy of this pairing: their bickering and entitlement; the patience of their Irish hosts, who wait until their guests are out of earshot before laughing at them. Yet, like much in this novel, this is merely a front for a more complicated emotional reality. There is no “bad guy” in The Colony, and no true hero.
The novel is dotted with short chapters giving accounts of the casualties in the escalating conflict in Northern Ireland. These incidents are occasionally referenced in conversation by the islanders, their responses growing from detached bewilderment to open horror. Interestingly, this is the least effective element of the novel. The deliberate blandness of the prose style in these accounts is more distracting than sobering, and the references to the violence on the mainland by the islanders feels strangely false at times. However, this is also a testament to the overall success of the novel. Despite its lofty concerns with art, memory and the nature of identity, The Colony builds to an emotionally powerful conclusion that this reader found deeply satisfying. And, like any good artist, Magee leaves us ample ambiguities to ponder.
The whole novel is awash with a weirdly wistful Irish melancholy, enlisted to tremendous effect. When Lloyd observes the cliffs he is to paint, he sees:
“…deep blues, pale blues, pinks and silvers, the colours shimmering in the sun… illuminating tiny particles of rock and sand pressed into each other millions of years before… highlighting too the ancient structure of the cliff face, planed in some parts, roughly cut in others, the rock hacked, serrated and puckered during that violent separation from the mainland
agony
swirling still
through water and wind”
Stylistically, there are echoes of Sarah Winman’s Still Life and Damon Galgut’s The Promise (both published in 2021), as sparse and unadorned passages of dialogue serve as bridges between the interior monologues of the central characters. Of particular note is Magee’s masterful rendering of Lloyd. Our initial impression of an exasperatingly petty man grows into a complex and uncomfortable portrait of someone who is at once kind and sensitive, and appallingly selfish.
Late in The Colony, Mairéad chooses to be painted naked by the artist. While she is excited and empowered by the experience, she reflects that in Lloyd’s eyes she is nothing but “the artist’s latest subject, his object, a creature of beauty unearthed on a remote Irish island”; that in London he will be regarded as “this great English painter of Irish women, his work encapsulating the exotic spiritualism of the Irish.” Lloyd, Mairéad, and we, as readers, are all complicit in this cynical act of documentation.
The Colony also strongly brought to mind a novel I recently read by chance: David Malouf’s wonderful An Imaginary Life (1978), a fictional rendering of the final years, lived in exile, of the poet Ovid. In both novels, the notion of “the uncivilised” being embraced, championed and self-servingly misinterpreted by the colonising eye of an artist demands reflection on the line between lip-service and positive action, between honouring a culture and shamelessly appropriating it. A vague squeamish feeling lingered with me long after I finished reading The Colony; Magee makes this a discomfort worth sitting with.
Rob Johnson is a writer and actor based in Sydney. His short fiction has been published by Overland, Aniko Press, Underground and Needle in the Hay, and his non-fiction by Audrey Journal and Switched On Media. For the stage, he has written The Recidivists (Red Line Productions) and Fat On Purpose (Giant Dwarf). As an actor, some of his credits include The Boomkak Panto (Belvoir), The Torrents (Sydney Theatre Company) and Rosehaven (ABC).