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.
