Audrey Magee likes to keep her readers at arm’s length. Her first novel, The Undertaking, shortlisted for both the Women’s prize and the Irish book awards, impassively dissected the lives of ordinary Germans caught up in Hitler’s murderous determination to obliterate the Soviet Union. In that novel, emotions were bleached from the page, forcing the reader to dispassionately observe action and reaction, choice and choicelessness. Her follow-up, The Colony, set in Magee’s native Ireland, applies much the same technique but now the distancing seems much more at home.
Following in the literary tradition of Synge, Trevor and Tóibín, The Colony portrays Irish lives cornered by the dead weight of tradition. Characters do very little very slowly and discontents are expressed sardonically or obliquely, if at all. Naturally, there’s also an equally traditional smattering of merciless killing and colonising foreigners. And Magee’s setting is traditionally remote, an Atlantic island off Ireland’s west coast, three miles long, with its 1979 population now down to double figures.
Into this stride two incomers. Lloyd is a London artist looking to revitalise his flagging career (and his marriage to a “darling dealer”) and he opts to come the hard way. Eschewing the ferry, he opts for a hand-rowed currach and pays the inevitable price with his breakfast. He has arranged to rent a cottage for the summer, to “paint the cliffs”. Needing and expecting solitude, Lloyd is less than gruntled to find the neighbouring cottage soon occupied by Jean-Pierre, a French linguist, who has made the island his doctoral test tube for the last five summers, charting and recording this surviving outpost of spoken Irish.
The Frenchman is equally disgruntled to discover an Englishman on “his” island, corrupting the purity of his experiment by dragging the increasingly bilingual islanders further towards the colonisers’ language. JP, as they know him, is no dispassionate observer - he is an evangelist for endangered dialects. Later, a somewhat off-the-peg backstory of Franco-Algerian disharmony will explain his fervour.
Inevitably, the two men lock horns, like “two bulls in a field”, each mocking the other’s mythologising of the islanders. So it is left to James, whom JP infuriatingly addresses as Seamus, to become the go-between. He is one of the island’s few remaining teenagers and is determined not to succumb to a life as a fisherman (barely surprising as both his father and grandfather drowned).
Befriending Lloyd, James discovers a natural aptitude for painting – it may be a naive skill but the professional artist sees that the boy’s canvases have an immediacy he will never match. Lloyd has come to the island as a Gauguin only to discover that one of the Tahitians is already the finer artist. Soon, James aspires to return with him to London, to become an artist in his own right; Lloyd encourages these dreams, quite possibly in order to keep feeding off the boy’s vision.
His widowed mother – by day secretly life-modelling for Lloyd and by night secretly slipping into JP’s bed – warns that London won’t be easy for him: the Troubles have just claimed Mountbatten. In fact, the book is punctuated by brief, fact-cool reportage of sectarian and terrorist killings – committed by all sides – which begin as choral intrusions between chapters but in time seep into the islanders’ own conversation.
Magee’s prose is always luminous, lyrical and pungent: sometimes sliding into vertical columns of one-word paragraphs, sometimes dwelling on the minutiae of rabbit gutting or the smell of Prussian blue, and yet always remaining ever so slightly distanced. And it would be wrong to say the book rises to a climax: in true Irish tradition, the story shrinks back to its status quo ante. Lloyd sails back “to Freud, to Auerbach, to Bacon”, JP’s professorship is in the bag and that very special Irish melancholy settles again over the island.
• The Colony by Audrey Magee is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
