The Colony

 Details:

• author: Audrey Magee
  
• full title: The Colony
  
• narrator: Stephen Hogan
  
• genre: literary fiction
  
• topics: #ireland, #politics, #irishlanguage
  
• publisher: Faber & Faber
  
• publish date: 01.02.2022
• timing: 8:28:00
  
  

My Rating of the Audiobook:

• content: 💙💙💙💙.5
• narration: 💙💙💙💙💙

 

My Thoughts:

It is 1979. Outbreaks of violence happen all over Ireland.

In contrast, in the middle of the Irish sea, there is a quieter mood on a small remote island. Colonization (and the English language) didn’t touch the island and its residents. Islanders use only the Irish language. A few residents speak or understand English, and some older women speak only Irish. Here, on this isolated island, the Irish language is preserved, untouched, and unspoiled.

An English painter, Mr. Lloyd, travels to this island where he will paint in peace. He seeks inspiration, and maybe he can create his masterpiece there. A French linguist, Jean-Pierre Masson, is another guest on the island. He studies the Irish language and wants to protect it. We also meet fifteen-year-old James, who wants new opportunities and doesn’t want to be a fisherman like his father and grandfather before him.

The two guests have different views on what is best for the island. So some delicate questions emerge. Is modernization or isolation better for the island? Should residents get better opportunities, or is island and language preservation more important?

The Colony is a quiet meditation on language, colonialism, and politics. It is a study of characters and a remote island.

I loved the narration by Stephen Hogan. With the help of Irish words, sentences, and a French accent, he made the characters from the book alive.

About the Author:

Audrey Magee worked for twelve years as a journalist and has written for, among others, The Times, The Irish Times, the Observer and Guardian. She studied German and French at University College Dublin and journalism at Dublin City University. She lives in Wicklow with her husband and three daughters. The Undertaking is her first novel.

In her 20s and 30s, she travelled extensively, first as a student, living in Germany and Australia, where she taught English; later as a journalist, covering, among many other issues, the war in Bosnia, child labour in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the impact of Perestroika on Central Asia. She was Ireland Correspondent of The Times for six years, and wrote extensively about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the subsequent peace process and the chaos caused by the Omagh bomb.