maura_kathleen 's review for:

The Colony by Audrey Magee

4.25

reflective medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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To be honest, this was sort of a slow start for me, even though the prose is in general quite brisk. Hard to say why, but the painterly approach to Lloyd’s perspective took a while to work for me, and it’s most prevalent in the early part of the book. In college, I had the opportunity to take several Irish literature classes and studied abroad in Ireland, and for some of the book, I wasn’t sure that on a message level, this was adding much that I hadn’t already heard from, say, Brian Friel — which isn’t a dig, truly, when it comes to topics as well-canvassed as British colonialism in Ireland and colonialism in general — but once it started to more firmly lace the connections between cultural imperialism with wider ideas about grief, opportunity, tradition, authenticity, and legacy, it began to really work for me. With a gentle touch, Magee traces colonialism and, more broadly, change and loss as a generational problem, that must take even where it gives, whose promises cannot help but be compromises. Also, of course, the ambition on the other side of it, full of goals it believes noble, self-centered to the utmost, glib in the act of derivation, taking what it was told to stay away from, unwilling to admit inferiority to that which it believes it “made”. Lloyd isn’t *all* villain, at all, which is to the credit of the novel’s nuance, but still…. Anyway, the most successful characters in the novel for me were Masson, particularly in the way that his own legacy as the product of a marriage between a Frenchman and a woman from colonialized Algeria affected his attitude toward James; Mairead, whose internal monologues were deeply moving and sympathetic and captured so well the layers of her character; and James, who was probably the soul of the novel for me. I was surprised by how deeply tense I felt about the question of his fate, and it was that sense of investment that made me realize just how far this book had grown on me. A strong piece for those with or without much knowledge of colonialism in Ireland, the history of language loss in the west, and the troubles.