The Colony by Audrey Magee

This book was long listed for the Booker Prize, and I read it within that context, and very much enjoyed it. The setting is traditionally remote, an Atlantic island off Ireland’s west coast, three miles long, with its 1979 population now down to double figures. Trouble is set in motion when two outsiders, an artist trying to give his career a jolt and a French linguist--they are both seeking to use the islanders for their own advancement. This story portrays the Irish islanders as cornered by the dead weight of tradition, and outsiders who interfere with them for reasons of their own. All the characters do very little very slowly and discontents are expressed sardonically or obliquely, if at all. There’s also an equally traditional smattering of merciless killing and colonizing foreigners, intermixed with short retellings of senseless and anonymous killings during The Troubles. This depiction of a neocolonial rivalry between a painter and an academic staying in an island off the west coast of Ireland and disrupting all in their path is at once dispassionate and luminous.