In her 2023 philosophical memoir The Fear, Christiana Spens develops a nuanced account of the way fear shapes both individual and collective action. Fear, in Spens’s formulation, is the paralysing feeling that external reality is hostile to the self, leading both to despair and to, eventually, the development of the self. For those who have suffered trauma, fear begins to define reality, leading to the feeling of powerlessness. Yet, Spens argues, embracing these feelings of vulnerability allows us to accept our own selves.
In The Fear, Spens studies this phenomenon both through her theoretical reading and an account of her own life. In The Colony, her debut novel, she goes a step further to instantiate it in both realistic and allegorical ways. The Colony opens with the protagonist, Lena, confronting the ‘existential terror’ (p. 1) of being alone. Lena explains that she has been drawn to troubled men, whose problems eclipse her own, and has not found peace: at the novel’s opening she struggles not only with addiction and insomnia, but persistent dissociation. When her friend Nate invites her to visit a community of like-minded people on Gull Island, off the Fife coast, it appears not only as a utopian idyll, but as a place where both of them can, removed from the rest of society, begin to heal.
The first half of the novel is largely occupied with prolonged flashbacks to two of Lena’s previous relationships, with the much older addict and artist Tristan, whom Lena begins a relationship with when she is nineteen, and subsequently another artist, Aidan. An early encounter with Tristan in The Colony Rooms in Soho suggests Lena’s continual desire for community, while her repeated dissociation also suggests its failures. In a discussion of Tristan’s death, Lena is able to voice the dynamic in which she keeps finding herself:
I fetishized surrender and servility […]. I longed for escape, but I did not realize that I would have to give this freedom myself, that I would have to give myself permission, rather than long to be given it by other people. (p. 45)
Love, Lena finds, appears to offer mutual escapism and support, but is tied up with masochism and surrender. In her relationship with Aidan Lena argues that submission is a way of opening herself up to ‘the chaos of life’ (p. 71), and yet as intentional as her approach seems to her to be, she still finds herself adrift, both during and after these encounters.
Throughout the text Lena is attentive not only to her own relationships, but to the complicated interrelation between addiction, memory, and desire. Throughout her account, the tension between acting and being acted upon is paramount; if her decisions in the past become clear to her, they do not necessarily suggest a path towards a better future. As such, the tranquillity of Gull Island, occupied by a group of troubled artists and a theology student, as well as a handful of scientists, appears to provide a space to reevaluate her life within a community. For Nate, the appeal of the island is that by focusing on its external beauty, he no longer needs to turn inward and think of himself. Landscape is an escape from the difficulties of selfhood.
Inevitably, this ‘Arts Council funded cult’ (p. 50) proves to be less utopian than promised. Lena initially finds herself at peace when she is put back in the position of obeying orders from Nate and Adrian, the colony’s effective leaders. Her days are divided between taking part in group meditation sessions, sometimes drug-fuelled, and cooking for the community, and in both activities she relishes her passivity. Sexual encounters seem natural rather than coercive, and while the reader begins to suspect abusive dynamics, Lena herself does not. Yet she becomes troubled by her friend Hana’s memory lapses, and the peculiar power relations within the colony. The community receives an external catalyst, late in the novel, with a series of bird deaths attributed to avian flu. Cut off from the mainland and surrounded by decay, Lena is forced to confront the misplaced authority she has not only tolerated, but potentially encouraged.
While The Colony echoes a number of recent Scottish novels about the horrors of intentional community, including works by Louise Welsh, Rachelle Atalla, and Ewan Morrison – and will particularly appeal to fans of Alice Thompson – its ultimate concerns are somewhat different. The paralleling of Lena’s relationships in London, Glasgow, and Gull Island suggest the extent to which her fear is not specific to a location or a person, but is an essential part of her. She comes to realise that she has sought out these situations because they allowed her to become a different version of herself, wilder and more free. As the tension of the novel’s final scenes increases, Lena turns her focus inwards. Even as the narrative incorporates more Gothic and semi-apocalyptic imagery, in ways that resonate with recent events, the focus is resolutely on the nature of vulnerability. As much as the novel offers a satirical approach to wellness communities and cults of healing, it is fundamentally a journey of self-discovery.
The Colony is distinguished most of all by its tension between content and style. Its story of resistance is told in smooth, reflective prose: the tumult of Lena’s inner life is presented in beautifully-shaped sentences, lulling the reader into acceptance of its increasingly disturbing scenarios. If it is accepted in psychoanalytic practice that self-protection and vulnerability are our primary concerns, Spens has found a way to dramatize that dynamic and illustrate the ways in which what we most fear and what we are most drawn to are often the same. Spens’s novel is an unusually sophisticated enquiry into the limitations of both individualism and community: its primary dramas are ultimately internal, and the terror that governs the characters is never fully left behind, even when the book is closed.
The Colony is published by Salt Publishing.
