CBR Bingo Square: New
Another entry in my summer of Irish fiction, but also one of the two Irish novels that made it onto this year’s Booker Prize longlist! (It’s a fun longlist this year, too, with both the oldest and youngest nominees, and the shortest book ever nominated.) I’m still waiting on Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These from the library, but I was able to check out Aubrey Magee’s The Colony almost immediately. And, oof, what a good novel.
The novel is set on a tiny island off the west coast of Ireland (invoking the image of the Aran Islands for many,
most likely), in 1979, one of the worst years of the Troubles. The island seems, on the surface, blessedly distant from all that, but for all the amenities they lack, the islanders have radios, and connections to their diaspora relatives who have relocated to America or mainland Ireland or the United Kingdom, and are aware of the wider world beyond them and its many woes. One family is the particular focus: teenaged James Gillan, who dreams of escaping, and his widowed mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, whose fisherman husbands all drowned while fishing. James refuses to join a fishing boat, and so the women eke out a living from James hunting rabbits and seabirds, and from renting out buildings on their property to visitors.
And that brings us to a dueling pair of foreigners who come to the island for the summer: Jean-Pierre Masson (who the islanders all call JP), a Frenchman studying linguistics who comes to observe and record the Irish-language speech of the islanders, conducting an intergenerational study on the central family themselves; and then Lloyd, an English painter hoping to revitalize his work (which his art dealer wife considers old-fashioned and dated). James manages to borrow pencils and paints from Lloyd to further his own nascent gift for art, and Lloyd alternately holds him at arms-length and encourages him, seeing a naive but also modern skill in James’s work.
The book unfolds in sequences on the island, in which the narrative perspective passes like a baton from character to character as they interact, and these sequences are interrupted by the steady progression of murders and reprisals being carried out in Northern Ireland. The lyricism of the island passages is heightened by the clinical remove of the reports of violence, in which Magee includes the age, marital status, employment, and religious affiliation of each victim, as well as place of origin for the young British soldiers who are killed on their deployments. At first these two parts of the story feel alien from one another, but as they continue, the women in particular comment upon them, with James’s mother Mairead feeling especially drawn to these tragedies as a bereaved woman herself. Lloyd and JP Masson are also drawn in as representatives of colonial legacies, both in Lloyd’s privileged indifference to the question of the Irish language and his willingness to make use of the island for his own needs, regardless of the promises he breaks (he begins almost immediately by breaking his promise not to draw any of the islanders, and his attitude of them is perhaps best summed up by his own self-comparisons to Gauguin); and Masson, who sees himself as a protector of the island, but whose desires carry their own imperialist weight, not least because Masson himself is half-Algerian, and as a boy refused to learn the classical Arabic that his mother longed for him to understand.
The tension tightens as the novel goes on, and it is perhaps wise that Magee gives us no real release from it: yes, Masson and Lloyd both leave and summer’s end, and there is no outbreak of violence that sends them packing, no bodies left in their wake. The tension instead lingers, appropriate because, of course, in 1979, nothing resolved: the Troubles would still continue, and people would continue grieving and/or retaliating, in ways that continue to reverberate across the island. Nor, Magee indicates, is the island as safe and remote from all that as Lloyd naively supposes: there are political passions burning hotly in certain hearts, and others will bear the weight of how Masson and Lloyd have both made use of the island, long after both of them are gone.
It’s a wildly different book from Anna Burns’s The Milkman, despite covering the same conflict in almost the same year, but they both offer fresh ways of observing and understanding the violence of the Troubles, and particularly the weight it places on various marginalized populations, without being exploitative or sensational.
