The Colony

Set on a remote Irish-speaking island off Ireland's west coast during the summer of 1979, the novel follows two outsiders, an English painter and a French linguist, whose competing ambitions collide with the lives of the islanders who host them. Interspersed throughout, brief vignettes document real sectarian killings during the Northern Ireland Troubles, cataloguing murders by the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) in spare, declarative prose. These passages accumulate as a backdrop of escalating violence that presses against the island's apparent isolation.

Lloyd, a landscape painter from London, arrives by insisting on crossing to the island in a traditional currach, a small handmade boat of canvas and tar, rather than the safer motorboat. Lloyd vomits repeatedly during the crossing and has to be helped ashore. His boatman, Micheál, is the island's middleman with the mainland. Once out of Lloyd's earshot, the islanders mock his arrogance and seasickness. Bean Uí Néill (Mrs. O'Neill), the household matriarch who hosts meals for visitors, is incensed that Lloyd clicked his fingers at her for service.

Lloyd rents a cottage and converts a bedroom into a painting studio. He walks to the island's cliffs expecting to find subjects for his landscape work and is initially disappointed. At dusk, however, he discovers the dramatic western cliffs, 200 feet of sheer rock with the Atlantic crashing below, and finds rich colors embedded in the stone. He decides to stay.

Lloyd befriends James Gillan, a 15-year-old boy who becomes his informal assistant. James is the son of Mairéad Ní Ghiolláin, a young widow whose husband, father, and brother all drowned in a single fishing accident when James was a baby. James brings Lloyd meals, translates with Bean Uí Néill, and reveals his desire to leave the island and its expectation that he become a fisherman. Lloyd sketches James holding two freshly killed rabbits, an image that becomes foundational to his later work. James demonstrates a natural artistic eye, correcting Lloyd's depiction of light on the sea.

Jean-Pierre Masson, a French linguist, arrives for his fourth consecutive summer, greeted with far greater warmth than Lloyd received. Masson is conducting a doctoral study of the Irish language across four generations of one island family, from Bean Uí Fhloinn, a monolingual Irish speaker in her late eighties who is James's great-grandmother, to James, the family's first fully bilingual member. Masson resents the presence of an English speaker on what he considers a linguistic preserve, while Lloyd dismisses Masson's preservationist impulses as sentimental. Micheál admits he told neither man about the other, having taken both their money.

Lloyd takes a utilitarian position in their recurring debates, arguing that investment in hospitals matters more than saving a dying language. Masson counters that language carries a people's history and identity. Lloyd accuses Masson of hypocrisy, noting France's own colonial destruction of languages in Algeria. Bean Uí Néill and Mairéad grow weary of the quarrels, at one point leaving their own kitchen to escape what Bean Uí Néill calls an eviction from her own home.

To escape Masson's constant talking, Lloyd moves into a derelict concrete signalling hut on a remote promontory. The isolation suits his work but leaves him physically vulnerable; during heavy rain he runs out of food and must return to the village. Masson, meanwhile, records Bean Uí Fhloinn's monologues about island life and traces the Irish language's decline through colonial policy, the Penal Laws (anti-Catholic legislation), and the Famine, tracking linguistic shifts year to year. Masson reveals that he is the son of a French soldier and an Algerian mother. His mother insisted he learn Classical Arabic against his will, while his father violently opposed any expression of her Algerian identity. Masson's study of Irish emerges as a displacement of his mother's cultural exile, enacted as far from both parents as possible.

Lloyd begins drawing Mairéad after she asks to see his sketches of James. He shows her a Rembrandt drawing and asks to draw her in a similar pose. She agrees, visiting the hut at dawn. He draws her with increasing intensity. Mairéad's interior monologues reveal her desire to be "lifted away" from the island, to achieve through art a permanence that counters the void left by her husband's death. She simultaneously maintains a sexual relationship with Masson and is aware that Francis Gillan, her dead husband's brother, waits to claim her as his wife.

Lloyd conceives his most ambitious work: a monumental painting modeled on Paul Gauguin's Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, transposed to the Irish island. He places Mairéad at the center, nearly naked and reaching for an apple, surrounded by islanders holding symbolic objects. The composition includes the ghosts of Mairéad's drowned family. After the assassination of Lord Mountbatten and the Warrenpoint ambush that kills 18 British soldiers on the same day, Lloyd adds contemporary violence to the canvas, repainting Francis with a balaclava, a gun, and a detonator.

James develops rapidly as an artist in Lloyd's cottage studio, painting original works including a group portrait of his mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother modeled after Rembrandt. Lloyd proposes a joint exhibition called "The Islanders" at his wife Judith's London gallery. James is elated, seeing this as his escape from the island. Tensions surface over artistic ownership when James discovers that Lloyd has adopted his idea of giving each islander a symbolic object. James calls Lloyd's approach "magpie art." Lloyd privately recognizes that James's drawings surpass his own. He burns several of the boy's sketches and secretly alters James's figure on the canvas, replacing paintbrushes with fish, redefining James as a fisherman rather than an artist.

As departure approaches, Lloyd tells James he cannot take him to London, citing the danger for a young Irish man in England after the escalating violence. James perceives this as abandonment: Lloyd started him as an artist and is now leaving him behind. Lloyd suggests Dublin art school, but James has no money and knows no one there. James wanders the island in anguish, eventually sitting on the ruins of the old Protestant school, built during the Famine to offer soup to those who would convert. He visits Bean Uí Fhloinn, who consoles him by observing that taking is simply in Lloyd's nature as an Englishman and an artist.

Francis confronts Mairéad about posing for Lloyd, claiming collective disapproval. She refuses to accept his judgment. Masson views Lloyd's completed canvas and calls it very good but derivative, warning that the attention it attracts could destroy the island's linguistic isolation. Lloyd dismisses the concern, arguing that tourism would bring the island needed income.

On the eve of departure, the islanders share a final meal. Mairéad finishes knitting James a jumper in the same style her husband wore when he drowned. She visits Masson's cottage one last time, acknowledging internally that he will not return and that no journalists will come to meet Bean Uí Fhloinn, as Masson had hoped his research would attract. Lloyd rolls his canvas for the journey. When Masson tells Mairéad her language is being lost, she corrects him: It is she, not the language, who risks being lost. The novel closes with a final Troubles vignette: a 56-year-old Catholic father of 14 children shot through his own front door as he washes dishes, mirroring the novel's juxtaposition of ordinary life with sudden, arbitrary death.