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The Colony: Audrey Magee

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for the sea took everything, beating him into fragments small enough to send across the earth on a journey of further erosion and rendering, pounding him into still smaller particles, atomised eternity granted unto him, oh lord, but nothing more, nothing for me to hold at night, to look at in the morning. It’s the lifeblood of the place from the dour, dry and black humour of the North to the lighter optimism in the South.

Her first novel, The Undertaking, was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, for France's Festival du Premier Roman and for the Irish Book Awards. I was caught like an unsuspecting rabbit in the net of this book, and days after finishing, I'm still struggling to escape its hold. He lodges in the home of a young window, Mairéad, who becomes his muse, the Gaelic equivalent of Gauguin's Tahitian maidens. There's also Frenchman Jean-Pierre, a linguist who has been making excursions to the island for many years to record how the “purity” of this spoken language is slowly changing with the increasing influence of English. The two take an immediate dislike to each other – JP due to Mr Lloyd’s corrupting influence on the island’s linguistic evolution, Mr Lloyd due to JP’s disruption of the peace he needs for his art – while both compete in different ways for the affection of the attractive Mairéad.The Troubles affects them of course, and the Mountbatten assassination brought the violence into the south. The author is also particularly dexterous in switching from interior monologue immediately and seamlessly to dialogue or to another character’s interior - with the two streams blending seamlessly together. The colony is carefully structured, with chapters about what’s happening on the island alternated with reports of sectarian killings from the Troubles in the north. I acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the traditional custodians of the nation in which I live. Inevitably, the two men lock horns, like “two bulls in a field”, each mocking the other’s mythologising of the islanders.

In her 20s and 30s, she travelled extensively, first as a student, living in Germany and Australia, where she taught English; later as a journalist, covering, among many other issues, the war in Bosnia, child labour in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the impact of Perestroika on Central Asia.My intuition tells me that I need to step well back to see it clearly, that only time and distance will allow the patterns to make sense. As it happens, the conflict between the two will affect more the family who hosts them than the visitors. These two visitors, aided by Micheál who is determined to make as much money as possible, stay close by in cottages near Mairead, her son James, her mother and grandmother. Your review reminds me so very much why we interpreting students are told to enter Deaf events acknowledging the honor of being welcomed in and to be humble. This word receives several meanings and shades in the novel, and the island with its inhabitants is the place which can be appreciated if not fully comprehended only by those who want to bond themselves with it.

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