Audrey Magee was born in Ireland and lives in Wicklow. Her first novel, The Undertaking, was short-listed 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 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. The Undertaking has been translated into ten languages and is being adapted for film.
Why do you tell stories?
To make sense of the world. Or to try, at least.
Describe The Colony in one (or two) sentence(s).
An English artist and a French linguist land on an Irish-speaking island off the west coast of Ireland in the summer of 1979, each man determined that his needs will be met by the impoverished islanders. Conflict ensues leading The Colony to explore what it is to be colonized and what it is to be the colonizer.
Do you think it's important to record languages? Or is it more a question of who is doing the recording and for whom and what purpose?
Too often language is weaponized, used as a tool to exert control and monopolize power, in turn creating a hierarchy of language. In Ireland, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I introduced policies to displace Irish as the language spoken by the Irish people. Those policies debased the Irish language, turning it from a beautiful language used in speech, poetry and song into a language that many became ashamed to speak because of its associations with poverty and illiteracy. To protect those diminished and ostracized languages, you record them to the best of your ability in the hope that future generations might understand the preciousness of what has been destroyed. I think that we are at such a moment in Ireland as more bi-lingual pieces of literature and film are being created. Those of us using the language in our work are deeply grateful to those who have gathered and still gather the fragments of language, seeking to protect them as we might an endangered animal or plant.
Are all authors frustrated visual artists? Could you see the paintings that were created in the novel, either literally or in your mind's eye, as you wrote them?
I don’t know about all authors, but I know that I have a very visual memory, that I see very clearly what it is I want to write. But I use words instead of paint. I am happy with words, though I doodle a lot as a I write, drawing the scenes or paintings that I want to put into words. I don’t think that makes me a frustrated visual artist but more a writer that needs to feel and see what it is she is creating so that it can then live by itself, beyond the walls of my being.
Tell us more about the character, James, the young boy who is really the fulcrum around which this story turns. How did you meet him/how did he come to be?
James turned up for me, the writer, as he does for you, the reader – suddenly. He lands into the novel to stand in front of Lloyd, the English artist, explaining how things work on the island. I didn’t plan him or know in advance of him as I knew of Lloyd and Masson, the French linguist. I knew that I was taking those two men to the island but I did not know setting out on this novel that James was already there, on the island, a 15-year-old boy struggling to find a place for himself in the world. He evolved to become, I agree, absolutely central to the work. I love his sensitivity, his artistic and political perspectives, but also his loyalty to his mother, his grandmother and his great-grandmother, a loyalty that binds him to them and the island in a way that he does not want to be bound.
We loved how the perspective shifted so seamlessly within a sentence or paragraph. Can you tell us more about this creative device?
Thank you. That’s kind of you. So, I wanted to explore whether interior monologue had a national identity. I have four characters with interior lives: Lloyd whose thoughts are staccato and fragmented as he lands on the Irish-speaking island, the assertive English outsider; Masson, the French linguist whose interior life is fluent and cohesive, Proustian, a man at ease on the island, certain of his place and his relationship with the islanders; Mairéad, the beautiful widow island woman and her son James, have interior monologues that are sometimes fluent as they are home on the island but other times fragmented like Lloyd as their lives are not truly their own. That is a lot for any book to carry. But I wrote as though writing the sea itself, one wave following the other to shore, blending, mixing then withdrawing, separating out as it returns to the ocean. The sea has a rhythm of its own, as I hope the book does.
The dialogue in The Colony is unique, do you particularly enjoy writing this aspect of your characters interactions?
You really are very kind. Thank you again. I love writing dialogue. I love writing the space around dialogue, that pause when the spoken and the unspoken hang in the air, that moment before a response is given and the full reality of what has been said is absorbed by the characters in the book and by the reader.
Can you explain your decision to separate each chapter with a verbatim account of deaths during the Troubles?
I wanted to explore the impact of that violence on us, the people who grew up with it as the backdrop to their childhoods in the southern part of the island. I do not at all equate our experience with what happened to those my age living in Northern Ireland but it did have an impact. The Colony depicts that steady but unremitting pulse of violence that was the backdrop to the childhood of many on the island of Ireland.
When and where do you write?
I am very fortunate as I have a room of my own where I have a desk, a computer, heating, light and everything I need to be a writer. I started writing when my children began school, and have kept to that routine, starting in the morning and working for as much of the day as external life allows. I am not very good at writing when there are others in the house as my subject matter can be quite difficult – especially my first novel, The Undertaking – so that I prefer to be on my own, wandering from room to room, muttering to myself.
What are three things that sustain you as an author, or while you’re writing?
Walking in the Wicklow mountains, pots of tea and more walking in the Wicklow mountains.
Name three books that you couldn’t live without.
Moderato Cantabile by Marguerite Duras; Emily Dickinson’s Poems, As She Preserved Them (edited by Cristanne Miller); Ulysses by James Joyce
What books are on your to-be-read pile?
I was just in Hatchard’s in London as they kindly selected The Colony as their Book of the Month. I went in to say thank you and came out with a pile of books, including Fin de Partie by Samuel Beckett and Le Square by Marguerite Duras, both plays in French and hard to find in bookshops in Dublin now as most foreign language books are bought and sold online. It was a thrill to find them on the shelf. I also came away with, among others, Paul Muldoon’s 1987 collection Meeting the British and Andrew Miller’s new book The Slowworm’s Song, about a former British soldier in Northern Ireland.