Ireland, 1979. Painter Lloyd gingerly takes a dinghy to a remote island off the Irish Coast, where he can lock himself in with the natives and paint for the summer. The natives eye him with wariness; they are happy to take his money and, in exchange, feed him, but they mistrust his motives. Not long after, French linguist JP also arrives on the island. JP is writing a dissertation about the Irish language spoken on the island; a language which is on the decline as young people leave the island and the influence of English pushes out the mother tongue. JP is a staunch defender of the language and abhors the fact that he now has to share the island with Lloyd, who is equally bemused at having the Frenchman around. The islanders dispassionately watch them bicker, with only fifteen year old James – infuriatingly addressed as Seamus by JP – as an intermediary.
It’s a very engaging novel,but one that keeps the reader at arms’ length, beautifully written but deliberately dispassionate. As it is with Lloyd and JP, the only islanders we ever get close to are James and his mother Mairead. Her husband, James’s father, have died a decade or so before when their fishing boat sunk, an incident that also claimed the lives of Mairead’s brother and father, and so Mairead sits on the coast and lets the world pass her by as she waits for her husband to come back. James, meanwhile, asks Lloyd if he can paint too; he shows promise, and Lloyd encourages the boy for selfish reasons, so that he can feed of the young painter, steal his fresh ideas, while stringing him along with promises of shows in London galleries.
The story is interspersed with businesslike reports of the atrocities committed by both sides during The Troubles, and Lloyd, as an Englishman, is mistrusted: he is a coloniser who has come to the island to use it for its own purposes, to take what he needs and leave. JP, however, is treated with the same disdain. He heralds himself as the saviour of the Irish language and is vocal of his disapproval when the islanders speak English, but his goals in coming to the island are the same as Lloyd’s: he dreams of writing a successful book about a topic that, as Lloyd points out, has been done to death. For all his protestations about English bringing down the island’s own language, he has a lot of dreams of dragging in foreign press to write about his successes. The idea that the islanders ultimately might need English for their survival never crosses his mind.
Eventually both men leave, having taken what they needed, and they leave behind the islanders as the long autumn and winter make their appearance. There is an urgent sense of dread but acceptance, too: this is how life has always been for the islanders, and how it always will be. Mairead will always be the young widow, James will not be a world-renowned artist, but a fisherman like his father: the future of the island rests on his young shoulders. The troubles rage on in the outside world, but life on the island is dull and static.