Colony

by Hugo Wilcken

From the author of the existential thriller ‘The Execution’ comes ‘Colony’, a novel set in French Guiana as the age of Empire draws to a close and anarchy beckons. The year is 1928. Sabir – petty criminal, drifter, war veteran – is on a prison ship bound for a notorious penal colony in the French tropics. Soon after his arrival in the bagne, as it's known, Sabir is shipped out to a work camp deep in the South American jungle but quickly comes to the realisation that his old life is dead, and return to France an impossibility. Yet, if he's to survive at all, he must escape the brutality of the bagne. Posing as a professional gardener, Sabir wins the confidence and protection of the camp's naïve, idealistic Commandant. With a group of like-minded convicts – including the secretive, enigmatic Edouard, a comrade from the trenches of WW1 – he soon launches his escape bid, across the seas in a stolen boat. Bad weather forces the men ashore, condemning them to a dismal, hallucinatory tramp through the jungle. As hunger and rivalry tear the group apart, Sabir understands he has scant chance of escaping into another life. In Part Two, Manne – deserter, itinerant exile – comes to the Colony in search of his deported friend, the same Edouard from Part One. With a false identity and cover story, Manne installs himself as a guest at the Commandant's house. There, he falls into an affair with his host's wife. Meanwhile, the Commandant is slowly unravelling, growing ever more suspicious of who Manne is and what he's doing in the Colony. Manne ends up trapped like everyone else in the bagne, and realises that he too must escape. The novel's two plot threads begin to merge – boundaries between dream and reality blur, bringing a surreal tinge to the dramatic climax. Both a page-turning adventure story, and a bold novel of ideas, Colony takes an historical background familiar to readers of Henri Charrière's ‘Papillon’, and twists it into a metaphysical journey. Brilliantly evoking an atmosphere of colonial decline in the tropics, the novel explores the shifting natures of identity, memory and reality.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels

345 pages, Paperback

First published August 6, 2007

About the author

Hugo Wilcken was born in Australia and is now based in Paris. He has written the novels The Reflection, Colony and The Execution, as well as a book about David Bowie's album Low.

Reviews

[Stacia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't want to give away too much about the story, but I will say 'read it'! (FYI, these days it's a bargain price of $5.98 on amazon or $3.99 on bookcloseouts for those in the US.) I'd definitely recommend it for anyone who loves Heart of Darkness, the jungle feel of Apolcalypse Now, hazy lines between reality and imagination, philosophical works along the lines of Camus (and perhaps a bit of Kafka tossed in). Two of the main themes are escape & reality -- escape from physical places, escape to/from oneself, escape from reality, shifting reality....

This book definitely deserves a wider audience.

A couple of great blog posts about the book:
http://theasylum.wordpress.com/2009/0...
http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/20...

[AC · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really fabulous. Wilcken is terribly under appreciated


https://theasylum.wordpress.com/2009/...


http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/20...

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

“In the East, the Far East, when a person is sentenced to death, they're sent to a place where they can't escape, never knowing when an executioner may step up behind them, and fire a bullet into the back of their head.”

All right, that isn’t from Colony, it’s from the David Lynch film Lost Highway. I read this novel after hearing it had been compared with Lynch’s film. And the comparison is really remarkable. Both begin by following the story of a man who has been incarcerated for (probably) committing a horrific crime, and who can only dream of escape through a process of becoming “someone else.” Both present a Mobius strip approach to personality and hint at the idea of a psychological fugue. The film and book both are split into two stories, and in each case there are strong metaphorical, plot, and thematic ties that marry the stories. In Colony, especially, there are a terrific number of instances of doubling, partnering, modeling, and replacing. The book is strange and oddly satisfying--an unusual example of the existential, literary mystery story in which the “subtext” is not buried but instead composes the greater part of the surface texture.

Also, I should mention that Wilcken has a real gift for moody but fluid prose. A couple of times I found myself reading 100 pages at a sitting (unusual for me). I think this book will be greatly appreciated by anyone who enjoys Paul Auster or Kazuo Ishiguro.

Note: Wilcken has published 2 other books, one of which is a short book about David Bowie's album Low. And, yes, I'm sure everyone remember not only that Bowie appeared in Lynch's Fire Walk with Me, but his I'm Deranged played over the opening credits of Lost Highway.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know it’s a tired cliche but when I was reading Colony I was reminded of Henri Charriere’s Papillion. There are similarities, mainly the fact that both novels deal with life on a penal colony and, at least for it’s first half, Colony is equally gritty and ragged.

The first half of the book focuses on Sabir, a french soldier, who arrives on the penal colony in South America and decides that his raison d’etre is to escape from it as quickly as possible. Eventually Sabir does manage to achieve this wish, but with consequences.

The second half focuses on a shady botanist called Manne. This time around he is approached by the island Commander’s wife, who wants to escape from her marriage into other pastures. Manne obliges and he suffers consequences as well. Clearly if you want freedom, there will have to be a price to pay!

This is a novel of breaking free of shackles, memory plays and important part in this book and it seems that most of the characters are prisoners of this mind trap and attempt to break free from it. Whether they succeed is a different story altogether.

Strangely enough, despite the fact that this is a gripping novel, I felt very unsatisfied after reading it. I wanted more. I felt that the characters weren’t fully developed, especially the commander and his wife and it leaves a sort of distaste by the end. Colony has a lot of good things going for it but unfortunately if the characters and some plot aspects ( let’s say the island scene – those who have read the book know what I’m talking about) could have had more depth and expanded.

[Andrew Hudson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A criminal is dispatched to a primitive colonial penitentiary and we are sent with him. He survives the harsh journey, survives his harsh bedfellows, survives the pitfalls that lie beneath dangerous dreams of escape by ignoring them as best he can, and is rewarded with the possibility of more than merely survival, a chance to create another life for himself. But at that very point of critical balance, he begins to listen to the dreams again, follows and is claimed by them, and can only escape into them ever further.

Colony didn't strike me so much as a thriller as what I think I'll call a fascinator - but it's a fine line between them and I'll illustrate with an example. Although the comparisons previously drawn have included Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, the thing this most connected with for me was David Lynch's Lost Highway. In the rough structure, and the theme of escape from an alienating environment at uncommonly high cost; dissociative externalising of pitiable weakness or violent urges into others; the compulsion of sex, and the loss of control to an apparently frail but ultimately dominant female figure; and most obviously, there is the progressive fracturing of personality and reality, the unsettling repetitions and parallels between them, the distressing distortions as some aspect of reality batters at the door. Finally Colony bucks my comparison, not coming full circle but instead pushing through to somewhere else; but what interests me is that, in my opinion, Lost Highway isn't a thriller either, though it skates very close to being one. It does have the trappings of a thriller, but what it is is something different - and that's what I think it shares with Colony.

In terms of style, there is no separation between introspection and action to be found, nor between the realities we pass through. Wilcken's prose is as clear and clean and refreshing as the world he describes with it is stifling and obscured, and the one highlights the other to perfection. He doesn't force explanatory detail upon us in a rush, but gets to all in time and layers up a powerful and authentic environment that remains sound even as the walls start coming down. He goes about the business of describing the needed delusion, the protective escape, the fabrication that has to convince the fabricator, and succeeds.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Colony, Hugo Wilcken's second novel, was published to scant publicity and little fanfare in 2007. The reasons why it has remained obscure start with a bland, forgettable cover design that looks like it might have been thrown together in ten minutes and cost the publisher a couple of pounds. Next, the novel itself is difficult to categorize, and in a marketing climate where any new product is defined using comparisons to already successful and familiar products, this spells doom from the get go. This is a shame because Wilcken is a talented writer and Colony is a gripping and suspenseful book that can perhaps best be described as a close examination of the fluid nature of human identity. It is 1928 and Sabir, a French veteran of the Great War, is being shipped out to a penal colony in French Guiana. Sabir is naïve but also smart enough to know that his survival depends less on who he is than on who he can become once he reaches his destination. Once in the colony he is able to adapt quickly as circumstances change, and with lies and cunning secures a comfortable position as gardener, working for the camp commandant. In the first part of the novel suspense builds as we approach Sabir’s escape attempt with several partners, one of whom—the enigmatic Edouard—is an acquaintance from Sabir’s time in the trenches. In the novel’s second part another French veteran, Manne, arrives in the colony on a mission to find his friend: the same Edouard. But Manne’s origins are as obscure as his intentions—he is already traveling under an assumed identity using forged papers and a bogus story to justify his presence in the colony—and he foolishly risks everything by forming an ill-considered alliance with the commandant’s beautiful but unreliable wife, agreeing to help her escape. This is a story that, scene by scene, conceals as much as it reveals, and by doing so suggests that trust between individuals is virtually impossible because in our heart we are all hiding the person we really are. Wilcken’s spare and coolly efficient prose is filled with profound observations on human behaviour, and displays true power in its terse evocation of lives being lived at the point where the struggle for survival intersects with the pursuit of something more. Readers will find themselves turning the pages to discover what happens, but also wishing to delay getting to the end because the reading is so pleasurable. It’s an exquisite dilemma.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whilst I was reading this book, I was trying to decide whether or not I was enjoying it. Now that I have finished it, I'm still wondering. The torpor of a tropical rainforest seems to have influenced me! I don't know what the book was trying to say, themes such as identity, ambition, love, possession and progress are explored, but I am not sure if conclusions are drawn. Read it yourself to see if you can make more sense of it. Then you can explain it to me.

[Monica · Rating 2 out of 5]

Judging by the positive reviews I am clearly in the minority. Let me just say that, because it says 'Papillon' in the description, I expected something completely different. I struggled through this book, it's not for me.

[Blair]

Loved Wilcken's other novels, but this has to be one of the most slow-paced things I've ever read and that's just really not what I'm after right now.

[Ian Cann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stark, brutal and tense, a really well written novel, gives you the real sense in which all the prisoners, guards, even the commandant and escapees are all trapped in 'The Colony', purgatory but with no hope of escape. The post-WW1 setting is played upon, with the horrors of the trenches playing upon the minds of those prisoners who are veterans such as Sabir, Manne and Edouard. Definitely worth your time, and I shall add Mr Wilcken's subsequent novels to my TBR consideration.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was obtuse enough to be interesting and though the writing wasn't as lyrical or as full of imagery as I usually like, it kept my attention until the end. There were a few loose ends and I think I worked out what happened in the end I didn't mind the characters, although they could have been more fully explored.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to read this book so bad, I really love this author:)