The Colony

Audrey Magee

Having read it

★★★★★

Like life it’s not perfect and is a little bit unsettled and disjointed (and a tad difficult to follow) in places but actually brilliant in its characters and their dreams, attitudes, opinions and speech, its story and its meanings and realities – a colony is and can be many things to many people – of brutal legacies and attitudes in amongst some small attempts to move onwards.

A good passage

There aren’t many of us, I know, willing to live like this any more. Áine, Bean Uí Néill, is the only one of my children still on the island. And she now without a husband or a son. My other children are under the sea, little Séamus who slipped off the rocks, God rest him and have mercy on him, or above the ground and living in Boston. American now. Too soft for this life. You see, there’s a harshness to life here, JP, that not everyone can manage. There’s a harshness everywhere, I know, city or country, but here it is more exposed, stripped bare by the weather and our isolation. That simplicity doesn’t suit a lot of people. They say it bores them, but I have watched. It’s not boredom, JP. It’s fear. The barrenness and rawness frightens them. Sends them away to cloak themselves in timetables, bills, holidays and houses, in sofas, kitchen counters and curtains, a life of buying and owning to mask the bareness of existence. Hide its harshness. Make it more palatable. Tolerable. But I wonder if it does?