Audrey Magee, The colony

The August book was an unusual read for Minerva members. It was written by an Irish woman and there are many themes, prominent though, were violence and isolation. Not our usual subjects of choice.

Audrey Magee is a journalist and novelist living in Ireland. This second novel, The Colony  was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and her first book, The Undertaking, was much acclaimed and translated into 10 languages.

The Colony is about a small community of Irish people living on a very small island nine miles off the coast. Every summer a Frenchman, J P Masson visits and researches the use of the Irish dialect some of the family and friends speak. This particular summer, a Mr Lloyd of London is visiting so he can paint the coast and the locals and become ‘the great British painter’. Interspersed with the relationships and doings of the main characters there are the most shocking accounts of the many killings which actually happened in Ireland during the summer of 1979.  

First Impressions

• I wasn’t sure about this novel at first but overall I enjoyed it. The ending ‘stonkered’ me as it just ended so suddenly. It was a good book and I look forward to hearing what the others think about it.
• I found it amazing, so simple, easy to read, sparsely written mostly, although the section written by Masson, the French academic was not. I wasn’t sure about the title. I really liked the way the author got inside the head of the characters. I found the violence jarring and it was a big theme of the novel. But there were other themes such as relationships, visitors, language and what it represents, how does a language survive and authenticity in artworks. Also exploitation is a theme in a relatively simple story. It was powerful.  
• I loved the novel. I agree the Masson section was a bit “telling” more than “showing”, but overall there is so much to think about. The ‘colonise’ theme was strong – the way people feel about being colonised  and their struggles. The Frenchman will not change his viewpoint and the Englishman took advantage of the people. There is great complexity. Some characters are bastards. I loved that the writing changed with the characters – for Mr Lloyd, the painter, the writing was visual and poetic, and for the academic, J P Masson it was voluminous. There was sparse speech and matter-of-fact sentences from the Islanders  often with a dry humorous twist.
• I heard an interview with Magee and liked the sound of the novel so much that I suggested we read it. I also noticed that the language changes with the characters and I also loved the humour. One very funny section is at the beginning – Mr Lloyd asks the boatmen to sing to take his mind off the currach’s movements but the boatmen refuse. (See page 15.)
• I thought it was a book of opposites – English versus Irish, English versus French, French versus Algerians etc. Also found the paragraphs describing the killings very impactful. Shocking waste of human life. 

Discussion

The author wrote a very powerful book by interspersing short chapters about the killings and naming the individuals involved, the victims and the perpetrators. It humanised the situations. The author was just 13 when these killings took place, in 1979, including the deaths of the Mountbatten family members and friends. From an interview, we learnt that Magee remembers the incident and thinking that there was no reason for the deaths. She also realised that the deaths were not just in Northern Ireland but were beginning to happen south of the border as well. It was a really significant event in the author’s young life. 

There was the sense that there was no middle ground, that you couldn’t escape it and some people were thinking it was just collateral damage, as did Francis Gillan, one of the minor characters. We thought the author was very clever in the way she got inside the minds of the Island characters, such as James and Francis. All the time we now think that Francis was involved in some way with the killings but we didn’t know.  Even though the Islanders were located offshore they were still involved in the violence. There is more and more comment about the deaths. 

What is this book about?

We thought the epigraph at the beginning difficult to understand:

‘truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, On truth and lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.)  

None of us are philosophers or have had training in this field of study so decoding it challenged us. One thought was that it relates to religion – people tell stories to give meaning but sometimes the stories take over and are seen as truths.  

Characters

The characters represent ideas which are presented in minimal language as are the descriptions of the landscape and the whole environment. There is little dialogue.

We discussed Mairéad at considerable length as she is a prominent character – James’s ‘Mam’, JP Masson’s lover, the beautiful model for Mr Lloyd as well as the dutiful widow waiting for her beloved dead husband. She is the moral centre of the book. She is open to different points of view and is very evenly tempered. She is a very good character.

She has a dream that her husband will return from the sea and that is why she cannot leave the Island. She also likes to think about her husband’s body travelling around the world as they had planned to do years ago.

Mairéad is also a bi-lingual English speaker, having her mother and grandmother speaking mostly in the particular Irish dialect which is being studied by the Frenchman. We wondered what would happen to her if her beloved son James left to go to London with Mr Lloyd. We also wondered what the older women thought about Mairéad appearing nude for Mr Lloyd. 

There was also talk about Mairéad’s dislike of Francis, her brother-in-law, even though he was trying to win her over. 

The Frenchman, and linguist, JP Masson created a construct which implicated himself in his own study and which thwarted his academic study. He was trying to be truthful about the dialect, but less and less people were using it and were becoming bi-lingual with English, because of necessity.  There is the constant rebuff to JP from James, for instance, of his Irish name of Séamus, which was the name JP always used for him. 

It is ironic that JP rejected his mother’s tongue of Arabic but feels compelled to insist on the use of the Irish dialect for these Islanders. 

Francis is an angry character who looms over Mairéad and has a presence. We felt that he would get physical with her when he found out about her posing for the painter.

James, Mairéad’s son, is also a violent character, killing the rabbits and being aggressive with the puffin when showing Mr Lloyd. It shows the Islanders are not perfect. There is anger there. We felt so sorry for James that he was thwarted in his ambition to become a painter – it was the ultimate cruelty the way Lloyd suddenly changed his mind not to take him to London. But some of us thought that Lloyd never really had James’ best interests at heart. James is still very young and he blossoms for a while under the tutelage of Lloyd so the ‘fall’ is even more heartbreaking.  

Lloyd is a copier and resents James’ new way of looking at art. He also seems jealous of James’ talent. James is put-down by Lloyd saying that he is young and doesn’t understand, even though James is reading art books sent to him. We briefly talked about Gauguin and his exploitation of Islanders for his art.

The argument between, James and Lloyd, is also about the position of Mairéad in Lloyd’s painting. 

There is also Lloyd’s fantasy about the London exhibition where Lloyd hopes to be seen as the next ‘Great British artist’. Lloyd thinks he is suffering for his art but he whinges all the time. The exhibition is a dream for James too.    

We also talked briefly about Bean Ui Fhloinn, Mairéad’s grandmother, who is quite aware of the realities of life on this isolated place. She smokes a pipe and allows herself to be courted by JP. Was she playing him along? She certainly wasn’t a simple woman.

The use of the Gaelic 

There is considerable Gaelic in this novel which we learnt was a dialect spoken by only about 150 coastal people in Ireland. The author did not want readers to be able to locate the site exactly of the novel, and so used a different dialect to that of the island. Irish Gaelic has had a sad history through the last few hundred years but there is a present-day resurgence.

Some members of the group thought the author was being very didactic writing the academic chapters detailing the history of the difficulties of the Irish being able to speak their language. As a piece of literature this section of the novel bothered these readers, who felt it could have been conveyed more subtly. Others of us liked to read this history. It was a nod to the author’s special interests and specialty. 

Language is a pivotal question in many cultures at the moment, particularly here in Australia with First Nation’s people reclaiming their languages and trying to increase the knowledge of them, not only in Indigenous groups but also for the wider Australian population. Language is the way we see the world. There is the inherent importance of culture in language and also the discussion of changes in language. Languages are not fixed and JP Masson did not want the Irish dialect of these Islanders to change but the speakers wanted that, so they could better communicate with the outside world. Gaelic is becoming more widely spread as many of us have seen when visiting Wales, Ireland and Scotland in the last few years. Gaelic films are also coming out and becoming more popular. 

In Scotland, too, the language is linked to moves for Independence from Great Britain.

With Colonisation, language was suppressed and replaced, as we have seen over many parts of the world particularly by the English and French. Now there is a reversal. People once colonised want their culture to dominate and for their populations to be bi-lingual. Gaelic is now recognised as a European language. JP doesn’t have the right idea we felt. There is no hierarchy in Indigenous languages like there is in English.

Other topics

There were a few other minor themes through the novel – ‘shrugging’ was one – lots of male characters shrug their shoulders. There was also lots of the use of the word ‘grand’. Although things were not necessarily as good as could be expected. It was used by the men taking Mr Lloyd over to the Island in the currach at the beginning of the novel and in this instance, it added a humorous tone.

We talked about the poor diet of these humble folk – fish, potato, rabbit, cabbage and apple tart. It must be hard to be interested in food with such a limited variety.

One member noticed the link of apples and Mairéad’s leaning up towards an apple tree in Lloyd’s painting of her. Is it a reference to Eve?

Members present: 5

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