Reading Ireland Month

March is Reading Ireland Month, run by Cathy over at 746books.

An island of approximately 7 million people, it has a successful and supportive literary culture, including four nobel prize winners (George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney) and six Booker Prize winners (Iris Murdoch, John Banville, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Anna Burns, Paul Lynch), plus an honorable mention for William Trevor, who never won, but was shortlisted five times.

Language and Life Intertwined

If you’re interested in a contemporary insight into Irish culture, literature and history, I highly recommend The Passenger – Ireland (reviewed here), which features long form essays, investigative journalism, literary reportage and visual narratives. It takes us beyond the familiar stereotypes to portray the country’s shifting culture and identity, public debates, sensibilities of its people, its burning issues, pleasures and pain. It was published by Europa Editions in March 2022.

One of the essays, An Ocean of Wisdom by Manchan Magnan, a man fascinated by the Irish language and its connection to fishing, tells of his travels to three Gaeltachtai (Irish speaking) areas uncovering local words and phrases that expressed aspects of the sea, weather and coastal life. He captured linguistic nuances that described a way of life fast disappearing and shared the complex reasons behind it.

More Ireland Island Literature, The Colony

My first book for reading Ireland 2025 is the excellent novel The Colony by Audrey Magee. This had rave reviews everywhere and I have long been wishing to read it. It did not disappoint, it has many thought provoking themes, yet can be read at quite a pace.

Mr Lloyd, an English man has come to an island, a rock three miles long and half a mile wide to paint the cliffs and have an authentic experience. He is trying to find inspiration and revive his career (and life).

We get to know his type immediately in the sardonic opening pages, which are illustrated on the cover of the copy I read. A man being rowed across the water to the rock where he will spend the summer, wants to recreate an authentic experience he’s seen a picture of somewhere. Reality, nothing like a still-life.

He looked down again, at his backpack, his easel, his chest of paints bound already to the journey across the sea in a handmade boat. He dropped his right leg, then his left, but clung to the ladder.
self-portrait I: falling
self-portrait II: drowning
self-portrait III: disappearing
self-portrait IV: under the water
self-portrait V:the disappeared
Let go, Mr Lloyd.
I can’t.
You’ll be grand.

The people on the island cater to his needs while fifteen-year-old James is curious about painting and drawing. He begins to learn, to practice, to observe what My Lloyd is incapable of seeing. The islanders have asked My Lloyd to respect certain privacy’s, lines he doesn’t take long to cross.

Rival outsiders on a mission

A while later, another man will arrive for the summer, Mr Jean-Pierre Masson, a Frenchman, returning for his fourth summer.

You speak the language Mr Masson?
Yes, I study Irish, or Gaelic, as you prefer to call it.
I have no preference.
Then we’ll go with Irish.
Masson drank from his cup.
I’m a linguist, Mr Lloyd, and I specialise in languages threatened with extinction.
And you’re here to save Gaelic?

The novel observes the effect these two outsiders have on the islanders, the rivalry and antagonism between them and the inability of the islanders to stop the change these two herald.

Lest We Forget

Interspersed between the chapters, single pages in short paragraphs, recount acts of terrorism, the names and details of those who are victims, targeted by different sides of the Irish divide. Thus the novel depicts the external colonising forces and the internal country conflict on the people.

Alexander Gore is a full-time member of the Ulster Defence Regiment standing outside his barracks on Belfast’s Malone Rod just after eleven on Wednesday morning, June 6th. He is twenty-three years of age, Protestant and has been married for four months. His nineteen-year-old wife is pregnant with their first child.
A truck drives down the Malone Road towards the barracks. Two IRA men in the truck open fire and kill Alexander Gore.

In addition to the islanders, there is the ghostly presence of the three fishermen who drowned, their absence keeping some endlessly waiting, anchored to that rocky outcrop, as if expecting them still to return.

Three good men lost on an autumn day. My son-in-law, my grandson and my grand-daughter’s husband. Gone. Never to come home. Not even for their own funerals. That was a hard time, JP. But as I say, you get hard times wherever you are. They have a great way of following people. Though it took a long time for the island to recover.

The Painter and the Academic, neocolonialism at work

Both visitors have backstories that reveal more about them and question their motives. They discover they can take more than what they initially came for and neither hesitates to expand their remit, because it serves them, it takes them away from looking at themselves, at their own story.

The islanders see all, some stuck in their ways, others with more freedom to slip in and out of what is expected and others have the desire to rebel or seek opportunity. As the visitors time on the island comes to an end, true colours are revealed, change is challenged by the old order and young James weighs up his options.

I very much enjoyed the reading experience and the delving into the different motivations of all the characters. The dialogue was excellent, the humour biting, the prose sometimes poetic and spaced out on the page, other times fluid like the incoming and outgoing tides, occasionally dense when it delved into the political and linguistic aspects and violent when those extracts are shared.

Highly Recommended!

Have you read The Colony? Are you reading any Irish literature this month? Let me know in the comments below.

Further Reading

Guardian review: The Colony by Audrey Magee review – island life at a distance by Jonathan Myerson

Read rave reviews of The Colony by Jacqui at JacquieWine’s Journal, Kim at Reading Matters (her favourite book of the year 2023), Susan at A Life of Books, Sue at Whispering Gums and Lisa at ANZ LitLovers.

Audrey Magee, Author

Audrey Magee was born in Ireland and lives in Wicklow. She worked for twelve years as a journalist.

Her first novel, The Undertaking, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, for France’s Festival du Premier Roman and for the Irish Book Awards. It was also nominated for the Dublin Literary Award and the Water Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. The Undertaking has been translated into ten languages and is being adapted for film.

Her second novel, The Colony was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022 and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction (2022).