This was not a novel that I found easy to read. I felt the writing didn't flow properly. There is no denying the storyline was beautiful and descriptions of Ireland which left me wanting to go there but I just didn't enjoy the writing style.

Thank you to Netgalley for the chance to read and review this book.

A beautifully haunting book set on a remote island off the coast of Ireland, surrounding themes of language, identity and family.

The colony is a unique book, its beautifully sparce, whilst full of sorrow, anguish and longing, a book that really captures your whole being from the very first page.

This is dire. I was going to say I wouldn't be reviewing it because the formatting of the ARC was so bad. But I decided to check the formatting in the finished book, and discovered to my horror it's supposed to be like this. When an author has to rely on "quirky" style then it suggests a lack of substance. I'll never know, since I found it so pretentious I couldn't read beyond 10%.

A poignant, multi layered novel about the advantages, but mainly disadvantages, of colonisation voiced by two visitors to a small Irish island and it's inhabitants. Incorporated within the story are the shocking headlines from the Irish "troubles".
A beautiful book which I would thoroughly recommend - I will be reading "The Undertaking" by the same author shortly.

This is a book that feels very... literary, but not pretentious. It's delicate, poetic, deep without being overly complex. The characters are on a small island, arguing about whether ensuring only Irish is spoken is preserving a heritage or appealing to tourists, and about English - the language of the coloniser, but the language they know speak easily and the language that brings the money. It was beautifully written, poetic entries scattered around the text, funny at times. I loved it.

Set on a small isolated island off the west coast of Ireland over the course of summer 1979, The Colony tells the story of two visitors, one from England, one from France and their interactions and relationships with the small community of islanders.

Lloyd is a painter - out of fashion, according to his fashionable gallerist wife – seeking inspiration and fame and hoping to find it by immersion in the wild, rugged landscape. Masson is a linguist, returning to the island to complete his doctoral thesis about the slow but inevitable disappearance of Irish language, hoping for acclaim the work would bring. The two men hate each other on sight, having internally claimed ownership of the island. The island itself has no electricity or mains water and the 90-odd natives, mostly old women and men subsist on fishing and smallholding, younger generations long gone to the mainland or the US. Mairéad, a young widow and her 15-year-old son James are the exception. The two are subjects of Masson’s comparative study, along with Mairéad’s mother and grandmother, four generations of one family. While James speaks English and refuses to be called Seamus, his great grandmother Bean speaks only Irish. For Masson, Lloyd’s presence on the island threatens his carefully planned thesis as English is now spoken on the island. Tensions rise over the course of the summer, mirroring the escalation of the violence in Northern Island, reported in brief paragraphs throughout the novel.

The Colony is a subtle but powerful novel about language, identity, tradition and modernity and above all, colonisation. Masson continually attacks Lloyd for the English colonisation of Ireland, while his own French-Algerian background and suppression of his Algerian heritage point to unresolved issues. Lloyd is typically arrogant and unyielding, his initial frenzied, almost obsessive sketches of the island’s birds and landscape stop completely when James tells him his birds’ heads are too small and that he is not seeing the light. Nevertheless he becomes at first a reluctant mentor to James who wants to become a painter and begins a new 'definitive' work, in the style of Gaugin’s Tahitian paintings, yet another act of colonisation.

I loved the structure of the novel, long internal monologues broken up by lively, often funny dialogue, Masson’s thesis and documentary reports of the killings in Northern Island – at first I thought these out of place until you hear the islanders talk about the victims and The Troubles inevitably make it into the conversation. I thought the added history of Ireland’s colonisation (as Masson’s writing) somewhat clunky but fabulous long passages about the landscape and painting, as well as Mairéad’s stream of consciousness more than made up for it.

One of my Best Books of 2022, hope it makes The Booker longlist. My thanks to Faber & Faber and Netgalley for the opportunity to read The Colony. Highly recommended, 4 and a half stars.

Lloyd an English man travels to an isolated island in order to develop his career as an artist. He is closely followed my J.P., a French man, who wishes to study the dying language of the islanders. Both are there for their own selfish reasons. The novel explores how these outsiders impact the lives of the people living on the small island.

There is an underlying tension that permeates this narrative and makes it an addictive read.

Extremely well-written: blunt and sparse dialogue is contrasted with a poetic beauty.

I recommend this and expect to see it on a few award lists this year.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

Full review to come on rte.ie/culture but in summary I found this book beautifully written, thoughtful, and supremely interesting. An exploration of culture, language and the family that rings utterly true.

An English artist comes to a remote Irish island to paint and find solitude, but there is both a welcome and resentment, exacerbated by a Frenchman who wants to speak Gaelic and disrupt his visit. Island life is hard and the women are not coping with the loss of a father, brother and husband to fishing. There is tension between the violence and the hard lives here, with separate reports of sectarian murders, detailing the ordinariness of the men, women and children killed. The young woman bemoans the loss of children’s lives, whilst for others they are collateral damage. There are parallel stories here of displacement and clashes of cultures in war torn countries, with a different colonisation problem of imposed changes to language particularly. Language is a prominent theme, with traditional being usurped by commercial needs, and the young will leave to find jobs in the modern world. The language of the book is unusual, and I didn’t like the constant changes of narrative perspective, it was difficult to keep up with whose story was being told when He and I were being used in the same paragraph. It was a very interesting read though, and it was very successful at conjuring a moody and wild terrain.

Lloyd is travelling to a remote Irish island because he wants to paint the cliffs. He is going in a rowing boat because he wants the authentic experience. He is nauseous and terrified as the boat's owner looks at him with bemusement and the ferry passes them by.

There is some lovely comedy in this initial scene of The Colony. It’s a familiar set-up, the wily locals laughing at the naivety of the incomer, happily taking his money even as they warn him of what he faces.

This is an Irish-speaking community. Lloyd is renting a cottage from a family, joining them for meals. When the men go away again, and with the women unable – or unwilling – to speak English, he relies on the youngest family member, James, to be his interpreter and guide. While Lloyd learns about the island, James is keen to gain the skills to move beyond it, leading to tension with the wider family.

This is further complicated by the arrival of Jean-Pierre Masson. He is a French linguist who has been studying the Irish speakers on the island and the encroachment of English for four years. The presence of an Englishman at the heart of the family is interfering with his research. Equally, Lloyd wants silence to create his art, and Masson’s arrival means constant dialogue. They inevitably come into conflict as each tries to articulate, if not impose, their own view of life on the island.

At the heart of the family is Mairéad. Mother of James, widowed young, she plays a crucial part in the lives of all the men on the island, from her late husband’s brother, to Lloyd and Masson. Each has an idea of who she should be, while she struggles to maintain her sense of self, as much as her memories of her dead husband.

Initially there is a timeless quality to the story. It could be the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century. There are only little clues that jar – such as Lloyd’s art materials being wrapped in plastic. Gradually, though, through the insistent interventions of the radio in the kitchen, the outside world is intruding. The island may be remote, but it is connected to Ireland and the wider world.

I really enjoyed the early part of The Colony, when we’re mostly seeing the world through the eyes of Lloyd. He thinks in images, expressed in terse, evocative terms. He imagines completed works, as if his own life only exists for him as material. Through him we see the startling landscape and his perception of the people – and of the world he has left behind.

I felt that Masson’s backstory and the lengthy passages about the Irish language were less interesting. The arguments between Masson and Lloyd were simplistic, even childish, but perhaps that’s intentional. They are both egotistical and determined to impose their own view.

Lloyd, an outsider at home, finds himself defending an English colonial position. It’s also interesting that he has a Welsh name, suggesting that Englishness is itself an identity constantly in flux. And it is Lloyd's fractured personality that is key to the novel's dramatic climax.

The Colony is a beautifully written, atmospheric novel, asking subtle questions, capturing a world of conflict in a small community, a family, even within individuals.
*
I received a copy of The Colony from the publisher via Netgalley.

This is a lovely lyrical novel that starts with a simple tale of remote islanders striving to make a life in modern-day Ireland with a dwindling population and a family shattered by the loss of their fishermen. When two strangers arrive at the same time to pursue their own interests for an island summer, everything changes.

The ultimately selfish motives of the English painter and the French linguist cause havoc among the islanders and stir up questions about the future of life on the island and the value of tradition, when set also against the daily horrors and murders on the Irish mainland due to the troubles.

The novel almost reads like one of the paintings that James and Mr Lloyd make of island's scenery and its inhabitants, layering different lights, symbols and history into a beautifully woven story full of longing and loss. It leaves a record of the island life that is very fragile in its beauty.

It took me a few pages to get into the rhythm of this novel, but once I did, it was an absolute delight. It's a well-known fact that Irish writers are experts at experimenting with language, and Audrey Magee is no exception. The result is a lyrical novel with great political significance, depicting two male egos - one a French linguist and the other an English artist - battling for a piece of turf that was never theirs to take in the first place. The depictions of the island itself, the life of this tiny island community, the inner life of Mairead and James, the reports of death after death as the Troubles are raging, the legacies of both English and French colonialism... every single aspect of this book makes it a remarkable piece of work.

This is a powerful and compelling novel. It is set on a small island off the coast of Ireland in the summer of 1979, The islanders speak Irish Gaelic and subsist on fish, rabbits and vegetables they have grown. Two visitors arrive for the summer. One is an artist and the other a linguist who has been tracking the demise of Gaelic for a number of years. The islanders mostly resist change except for James and his mother, who want more from the visitors. Throughout the novel are interspersed details of atrocities committed during the troubles, including the blowing up of Lord Mountbatten and his family, which gives a sense of peril throughout. There is no speech punctuation, which usually annoys me but here it feels natural. The question at the end, when the visitors prepare to depart is - who has gained from this summer of terror?