39 Books: 2007

When I chose the book for 2007, the constraint of the 39 Books series presented a problem: how can I write about a 350-page novel last read 17 years ago without taking several days to reread it? Answer: not at all, so I started reading. What good fortune! How well Hugo Wilcken tells the story and how pleasurably we are bound to it!

Colony opens a century ago in the bowels of a boat transporting newly convicted prisoners to a penal colony in French Guiana. It follows Sabir as dread of arrival and flashbacks from his past life merge. His crime is not given and, curiously, we don't care because of the anticipation of what's ahead.

Sabir wants to forget his previous life in France, but dreams won't let him. He plans to make a little money writing letters home for illiterate prisoners, but they gradually lose interest because "the colony absorbs you until there is no other world". Still, the fantasy of escape remains. One convict manages it by punching a jailer and stabbing a guard. Sabir imagines himself in his place but his reverie cannot extend beyond the thrust of the knife.

Meanwhile, we read Colony to escape from the world by reading a novel set in an exotic land and by becoming another. We read also because the world escapes us and we turn to novels to bring it closer. Colony is the constraint of a novel offering glimpses of escape, which is also itself. Sabir's experience is therefore the experience of reading a novel.

*

When Colony was published, my enthusiasm was picked up by fellow book blogger John Self who then promoted alongside Mark Thwaite of the now-defunct ReadySteadyBook to see how well blogs could improve the sales of "scandalously overlooked" novels such as this. According to Private Eye magazine, it didn't work very well and there were smug and bitchy comments about John and Mark by an anonymous figure. This confirmed to me that blogs had to challenge this country's relentlessly small-minded book culture rewarding corporate drones. Eventually I gave up responding to its cretinous discourse. However, John Self has long since abandoned his blog to become one of the better professional book reviewers and has unfollowed me on Twitter.