Q&A with Audry Magee

Irish novelist, Audrey Magee (author of The Colony) talks to John Hagan about her literary influences, the Irish language and bringing her work to the screen.

JH: Who were/are your major literary influences? AM: That would have to be Marguerite Duras, the French writer I read for the first time as a 16-year-old. I had been reading all the usual Irish, British and American writers but here was a woman who created space for me as a reader. She did not spoon-feed me, did not tell me what to think, how to think, what to feel; instead she created, through spare but beautiful writing, a space where I could think for myself, feel for myself, a space where I could be an active reader, a participant in the experience of creating a world with words. After her, it has to be Camus and Beckett. I love Beckett for his sparseness, his distillation of huge issues into a fragment, sometimes even a sound, an utterance. With Camus, I always return to his capacity for blending narrative into great political and social novels. I still read a lot of French writers. It is probably the space where I feel most at home as a reader. JH: If you were not a best-selling author, what would you be doing with your life? AM: That is a big question. I am happy when I am writing, even though the things I write about are often difficult. I enjoyed my time in journalism (Ireland Correspondent of The Times, roving reporter with The Irish Times covering the war in Bosnia, child labour in Pakistan and Bangladesh) as I am by nature a wanderer who loves talking to people. But I needed to go deeper than journalism allowed, deeper into language and into the issues of what it is to be a human being framed by different political and social systems. Novel writing gives me that space, and I am profoundly grateful to have that space, that capacity to explore what it is to be human. If I wasn’t doing this, the reality is that I would probably be in Poland or Romania or Moldova, on the border with Ukraine, talking with refugees as they flee their homes, abandoning their former lives. Reporting remains a very important job. Hearing from these people first hand and telling their stories remains a vital part of our humanity. JH: Jean-Pierre Masson, one of the principal characters in The Colony, is dedicated to saving a fading Irish dialect. Are you also concerned about preserving threatened language? AM: I am a linguist. My first degree, from University College Dublin, was in French and German language and literature. I also studied linguistics as part of that degree. But I am a linguist who does not speak Irish, who, like Joyce and many other Irish writers, turned her back on Irish in favour of English and the languages of the Continent. Why is that? Why did I do that? Why did so many other people my age despise and shun the language? Theoretically it is only a language. What harm can a language do? Unfortunately, language is

repeatedly a casualty of colonization. Language is politicized and used as a weapon, first by the colonizers to debase the culture and to fracture the unity of a community speaking a language that is not the language of the colonizer; then by the colonized, as a mark of nationalism, as a badge of commitment to the nationalist cause. For many this polarization is too much and it becomes easier to step away from the language altogether as Joyce did when he fled Ireland for Europe, declaring English as the language of the continent. But he too was a linguist, a man who learnt Norwegian so that he could read Ibsen in its original form. Inevitably, as a linguist, you return to the original language, the mother tongue, as Joyce did in his work, particularly in Finnegans Wake, as I do now in The Colony. The Irish language is incredibly beautiful, an ancient language suffused with the history of Irish land, place and narrative. The dialect that I use in The Colony is from a very remote corner of north-west Mayo and is only spoken now by 160 people, so few people holding that linguistic connection to previous generations of speakers. The death of the language on the west coast of Ireland is in stark contrast to urban Dublin where the language is thriving. There are now more people speaking Irish on the east coast than in the Gaeltacht or Irish speaking areas of the west coast, parts of Ireland that remain neglected and impoverished. But the Irish in the Dublin area is for most a second language, learnt in school rather than at home, often taught by teachers who are themselves second language learners of Irish. Does this matter as long as it is Irish? On January 1st last, Irish became an official language of the European Union, rendering it possible that more people will speak Irish in Dublin and Brussels than in the Gaeltacht areas. Maybe this doesn’t matter as long as it is Irish, but maybe it does as language carries so much about a people, a landscape, a land, a history, a perspective on the world. JH: The desire to escape is evident amongst some of characters in The Colony. Has such a motivation played any role in your own life? AM: I grew up on the island of Ireland plagued by bombings and shootings, on an island where the Catholic Church determined how people, women in particular, should live their lives. As a teenager and later as a young Irish woman who spoke French and German, I was very keen to get off that island. JH: Why intersperse chapters in The Colony with short accounts of violent Irish sectarian incidents? AM: I wanted to understand the impact of that violence on people of my generation. This is not a book about Northern Ireland but about the southern perspective on the impact of that violence on the people south of the border. The violence is a pulse through the novel, emerging slowly but gradually from the hinterland of the characters’ lives until the atrocities grow in their awfulness and are impossible to ignore; much as it was for us growing up in Ireland. JH: As with your previous book (The Undertaking), The Colony has been optioned for film. Who would you choose to be amongst your dream cast? AM: I had a dream cast for The Undertaking but it turns out that the film world is even slower than the book world – my first dream cast is now far too old for the characters in The Undertaking! So, no more dream casts. I am, however, a huge admirer of the work of Irish actor Saoirse Ronan and Ethiopian-Irish actor Ruth Negga. I loved Ruth’s interpretation of Hamlet in the Gate Theatre, Dublin. JH: By now, following the publication of The Colony, you will be occupied writing your next novel. Can you share something about it for Irish Scene readers? AM: I am very private about my writing. I don’t discuss it until it is done as I worry that the characters will evaporate if I talk of them. Apologies Irish Scene, no sharing!

See Book Reviews for The Colony