4 minute read
THE COLONY by Audrey Magee
the colony
arresting him, is anything but eager to take MJ’s case. But the murder of Richard Gross, MJ’s attorney and manager, ups the stakes. So does Sunny’s meeting with MJ’s second ex-husband, psychotherapist Dr. John Melvin, who stalked and nearly killed MJ in Shrink Rap (2002) before he was convicted and imprisoned. Melvin’s clearly as bent on revenge as ever, but the more Sunny looks around, the wider the pool of candidates grows. Eventually the trail leads to professor Charles Hall, who taught MJ writing and a few other things at Whitesboro College. Now old and suffering from dementia, he’s transfixed by his first sight of Sunny, whom he clearly mistakes for someone else before he withdraws even more completely from the world. Who did he think she was, and what secrets is MJ hiding that could endanger both herself and Sunny?
Behind the overgrown subplots is a fleet and absorbing tale of crime and endless punishment.
THE COLONY
Magee, Audrey Farrar, Straus and Giroux (384 pp.) $28.00 | May 17, 2022 978-0-3746-0652-7
With the arrival of two foreigners, a painter and a linguist, a sparsely populated island off the Irish coast becomes the setting for life-changing choices and conflicts.
Magee’s multifaceted second novel is set in 1979 on a nameless rocky outcrop measuring three miles long and half a mile wide, population 92, where debates of profound significance about ownership and expression, language and culture, will develop. Mr. Lloyd, an English artist—heedless and demanding—has come to paint the island’s harsh beauty, tackling birds, cliffs, and light before embarking on the huge symbolic canvas he will think of as his masterpiece. The other visitor is
Jean-Pierre Masson, a French linguist with an Algerian mother, returning to the island to finish a thesis he’s been working on for five years devoted to the speaking of Gaelic, the original Irish language, which is dying out—as is typical in cultures oppressed by a colonizer, in this case the British. The islanders, depicted with wit and restraint, differ in their responses to the two incomers. Young widow Mairéad sleeps with Masson and allows Lloyd to paint her nearly naked. Mairéad’s 15-yearold son, James, discovers his own aptitude for art through Lloyd, intensifying his intention of escaping the legacy of the island and the burden of cultural expectation. Meanwhile, the women hold island life together, working incessantly, immovably rooted. And punctuating this panorama of lyrical beauty, effort, and complex connection, Magee introduces the steady drumbeat of murder, as the factions on the mainland—Protestant versus Catholic, Ulster loyalists versus the Irish Republican Army—bomb and shoot their enemies: soldiers, policemen, fellow citizens. The pace is unhurried, the tone often poetic as the author assembles location, character, and identity, but Magee’s path is both subtle and steely, lending a sense of inevitability as opinions harden, trusts are betrayed, and old patterns reassert themselves, devastatingly.
A finely wrought, multilayered tale with the lucidity of a parable.
THE GARDEN OF BROKEN THINGS
Momplaisir, Francesca Knopf (320 pp.) $28.00 | May 10, 2022 978-0-593-32106-5
The author of My Mother’s House (2020) asks if we can escape the damage we inherit. When her teenage son, Miles, starts misbehaving, Genevieve’s fears for his safety in New York become unbearable. She can’t seem to make him understand that Black boys don’t have the luxury of screwing up. In an effort to make him more mindful of everything he has—and everything he has to lose— she decides to take him to her family’s ancestral home. She’s surprised to find herself echoing the parents she heard threatening their children with exile to Haiti if they didn’t behave when she was a girl herself, and this sense of inevitable recurrence is one of the driving themes of this novel. In addition to wanting to save her American son, Genevieve wants to rescue her cousin Ateya’s daughter, just like Genevieve’s mother wanted to rescue Ateya, and Genevieve’s grandmother wanted to rescue Ateya’s mother. Ateya abuses little Ti’Louse as brutally as her father abused her. This is a novel about generational trauma on a personal scale, but Momplaisir also depicts the entire country of Haiti as a victim of generational trauma wrought by wave after wave of colonizers. The precarious nature of Haiti’s civic institutions is laid bare by the massive earthquake that devastated the island nation in 2010. Both Genevieve and Ateya survive the initial cataclysm, but their very different fates are defined by their disparate wealth, status, and personal history. As she did in her debut, Momplaisir uses the tropes of magical realism to confront complex and troubling topics while relying heavily on exposition. And, here, the text is repetitive at both the micro and the macro levels. She piles metaphor on top of metaphor and shares the same elements from her characters’ pasts over and over again, to the point of inuring the reader to the physical and emotional violence she describes.
