Offshore: A Novel

By Penelope Fitzgerald

The eccentric residents of a houseboat community along the Thames in London float between loneliness and connection in this Booker Prize–winning novel.

On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of the slightly disreputable, the temporarily lost, and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the great river’s tides. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they cling to one another in a motley yet kindly society. There is Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by happenstance a receiver of stolen goods. And Richard, a buttoned-up ex-navy man whose boat dominates the Reach. Then there is Nenna, a faithful but abandoned wife, the diffident mother of two young girls running wild on the waterfront streets.

It is Nenna’s domestic predicament that, as it deepens, draws the relations among this scrubby community together into ever more complex and comic patterns. The result is one of Fitzgerald’s greatest triumphs, a novel the Booker judges deemed “flawless.”

This edition includes a new introduction from Alan Hollinghurst.

“Dazzling. The novelistic equivalent of a Turner watercolor.” —Washington Post

“A small and very bright treasure.” —Kirkus Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9780547525501

Penelope Fitzgerald

PENELOPE FITZGERALD wrote many books small in size but enormous in popular and critical acclaim over the past two decades. Over 300,000 copies of her novels are in print, and profiles of her life appeared in both The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. In 1979, her novel Offshore won Britain's Booker Prize, and in 1998 she won the National Book Critics Circle Prize for The Blue Flower. Though Fitzgerald embarked on her literary career when she was in her 60's, her career was praised as "the best argument ... for a publishing debut made late in life" (New York Times Book Review). She told the New York Times Magazine, "In all that time, I could have written books and I didn’t. I think you can write at any time of your life." Dinitia Smith, in her New York Times Obituary of May 3, 2000, quoted Penelope Fitzgerald from 1998 as saying, "I have remained true to my deepest convictions, I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?"

Book preview

Copyright © 1979 by Penelope Fitzgerald

Preface copyright © 2013 by Hermione Lee

Introduction copyright © 2013 by Alan Hollinghurst

Second Mariner Books edition 2014

First published in Great Britain in 1979 by William Collins Sons and Co., Ltd.

Reprinted by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Fitzgerald, Penelope.

Offshore / Penelope Fitzgerald.

—1st Mariner ed.

p. cm.

A Mariner book.

ISBN 978-0-544-36151-5 (pbk)

1. Mothers and daughters—England—London—Fiction. 2. Battersea (London, England)—Fiction. 3. Barges—England—Thames River—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6056.186034 1998

823'.914—dc21 97-50403 CIP

eISBN 978-0-547-52550-1

v4.0518

Preface: Penelope Fitzgerald

When Penelope Fitzgerald unexpectedly won the Booker Prize with Offshore, in 1979, at the age of sixty-three, she said to her friends: ‘I knew I was an outsider.’ The people she wrote about in her novels and biographies were outsiders, too: misfits, romantic artists, hopeful failures, misunderstood lovers, orphans and oddities. She was drawn to unsettled characters who lived on the edges. She wrote about the vulnerable and the unprivileged, children, women trying to cope on their own, gentle, muddled, unsuccessful men. Her view of the world was that it divided into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’. She would say: ‘I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost.’ She was a humorous writer with a tragic sense of life.

Outsiders in literature were close to her heart, too. She was fond of underrated, idiosyncratic writers with distinctive voices, like the novelist J. L. Carr, or Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop, or the remarkable and tragic poet Charlotte Mew. The publisher Virago’s enterprise of bringing neglected women writers back to life appealed to her, and under their imprint she championed the nineteenth-century novelist Margaret Oliphant. She enjoyed eccentrics like Stevie Smith. She liked writers, and people, who stood at an odd angle to the world. The child of an unusual, literary, middle-class English family, she inherited the Evangelical principles of her bishop grandfathers and the qualities of her Knox father and uncles: integrity, austerity, understatement, brilliance and a laconic, wry sense of humor.

She did not expect success, though she knew her own worth. Her writing career was not a usual one. She began publishing late in her life, around sixty, and in twenty years she published nine novels, three biographies and many essays and reviews. She changed publisher four times when she started publishing, before settling with Collins, and she never had an agent to look after her interests, though her publishers mostly became her friends and advocates. She was a dark horse, whose Booker Prize, with her third novel, was a surprise to everyone. But, by the end of her life, she had been shortlisted for it several times, had won a number of other British prizes, was a well-known figure on the literary scene, and became famous, at eighty, with the publication of The Blue Flower and its winning, in the United States, the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Yet she always had a quiet reputation. She was a novelist with a passionate following of careful readers, not a big name. She wrote compact, subtle novels. They are funny, but they are also dark. They are eloquent and clear, but also elusive and indirect. They leave a great deal unsaid. Whether she was drawing on the experiences of her own life—working for the BBC in the Blitz, helping to make a go of a small-town Suffolk bookshop, living on a leaky barge on the Thames in the 1960s, teaching children at a stage-school—or, in her last four great novels, going back in time and sometimes out of England to historical periods which she evoked with astonishing authenticity—she created whole worlds with striking economy. Her books inhabit a small space, but seem, magically, to reach out beyond it.

After her death at eighty-three, in 2000, there might have been a danger of this extraordinary voice fading away into silence and neglect. But she has been kept from oblivion by her executors and her admirers. The posthumous publication of her stories, essays and letters is now being followed by a biography (Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee, Knopf, 2014), and by these very welcome reissues of her work. The fine writers who have done introductions to these new editions show what a distinguished following she has. I hope that many new readers will now discover, and fall in love with, the work of one of the most spellbinding English novelists of the twentieth century.

Hermione Lee

Advisory Editor

Introduction

‘Everything that you learn is useful,’ says the eleven-year-old Martha in Offshore. ‘Didn’t you know that everything you learn, and everything you suffer, will come in useful at some point in your life?’ Her little sister complains she is merely parroting the wisdom of their schoolteacher, Mother Ignatius, but Penelope Fitzgerald herself is surely standing close behind her. All Fitzgerald’s books are the product of maturity, reflection, the quickly touched depth of accumulated knowledge and long experience. Their creation reflects the new sense of opportunity that may come with the bereavements and displacements of later life. It was after her father, Edmund Knox, died in 1971 that she wrote her first book, a life of the artist Edward Burne-Jones, which came out in 1975, when Fitzgerald was fifty-nine. Her father himself became one of the subjects of her next book, the remarkable joint biography The Knox Brothers, published in 1977. Both these biographies draw on a lifelong exposure to, and reckoning with, the artistic, intellectual and spiritual life of the generations immediately before her own, made vital to her through her own extraordinary family. After this, Fitzgerald’s first extended fiction, The Golden Child, was written to entertain her husband Desmond before his death in 1976; the eight novels, the stories, the further biography and all the luminous journalism that followed were thus the work of a quarter-century of widowhood.

As a novelist Penelope Fitzgerald drew at first quite directly on her own life, discovering, in her late shift of circumstance and perspective, the potential for making distinctive art out of several earlier episodes in an often difficult and ramshackle career. Her period working in a Southwold bookshop had fed The Bookshop (1978), and in Offshore (1979) she turned to the years, her lowest and most difficult, living on an old Thames sailing barge on Battersea Reach; later, Human Voices (1980) would draw on her years of employment at the BBC during the war, and At Freddie’s (1982), her most exuberantly comic novel, on her time as a teacher at the Italia Conti stage school. Offshore too is at times very funny, though tonally it is the most mercurial of all her books. She herself called it a ‘tragi-farce’.

At its centre is a young Canadian woman, Nenna James, forced at last to accept that the English husband who has abandoned her and their two children will never come back to her. Nenna, who has unfulfilled artistic interests (she trained as a violinist), lives on a houseboat called Grace, just as Fitzgerald had done; but she has married much younger: she is thirty-two and her elder daughter eleven—a reminder and a warning that Fitzgerald, who was married at twenty-five, had three children, and lived on the Thames for two years in her mid-forties, reused her own life as freely and selectively as she liked. Flowing through and around Nenna’s story is a study of the people living alongside her on interconnected boats. In The Bookshop Fitzgerald had created a vulnerable female protagonist effectively starved of a history, and in a sparsely realised setting: it is a tale of Gothic exaggerations and simplicities. But already in Offshore you see her mature and concise ability to give whole lives in touches of discreet detail. The other boat owners—smart Richard Blake and his disenchanted landlubber wife, the all-too-accommodating rent boy Maurice, the old marine painter Sam Willis, who wants to sell his boat before it sinks—appear in a tableau in the opening scene, but their group portrait is constantly developing, since change and flux are the essence of the book, and Fitzgerald moves between the strands of her story with insouciant wit and ease. It is the novel in which she finds her form—her technique and her power. Her procedure, always prizing the ‘spare, subtle and economical’, is aptly at its most fluid in Offshore.

Fitzgerald professed herself drawn as a writer to ‘people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost . . . They are ready to assume the conditions the world imposes on them, but they don’t manage to submit to them, despite their courage and their best efforts . . . When I write it is to give these people a voice.’ In Offshore, her barge dwellers, ‘creatures neither of firm land nor water’ may aspire to the ‘sensible’ and ‘adequate’ conditions of life on the Chelsea shore. ‘But a certain failure, distressing to themselves, to be like other people, caused them to sink back, with so much else that drifted or was washed up, into the mud moorings of the great tideway.’ She wrote later that she regretted translations of her title that suggested ‘far from the shore’—the point was the unsteady nature of the craft anchored mere yards away from the bank, and the ‘emotional restlessness of my characters, halfway between the need for security and the doubtful attraction of danger’.

All of course have their own reasons, and some manage better than others—Fitzgerald as ever has a keen understanding of the worried and hard-up. The novel’s astute psychological portraits show her clear but sympathetic grasp of their mental habits, the notions they have long depended on, but that will not save them in the end. Practical Richard, advising poor Willis about readying his boat for sale, can’t understand that he is ‘dealing with, or rather trying to help, a man who had never, either physically or emotionally, felt the need to replace anything’. Willis indeed ‘had come to doubt the value of all new beginnings and to put his trust in not much more than the art of hanging together’. (As it happens, a new beginning—or anyway a dramatic change—will be forced upon him.) Nenna is more alert to her own failures of reason, and submits to long imaginary hearings before a magistrate, in which her ideas of her marriage and its prospects are subjected to withering forensic scrutiny. Even affluent, efficient, honourable Richard, ‘the kind of man who has two clean handkerchiefs on him at half past three in the morning’, is touchingly shown as the victim of habits of mind bred in him by social and naval training: ‘This last reflection . . . seemed to tidy up the whole matter, which his mind now presented as a uniform interlocking structure, with working parts.’ Tragi-farce keeps them all in motion, its ambiguous terms never resolving into one or the other state. In a piece written ten years later Fitzgerald revealed that the original of Maurice, ‘an elegant young male model’ who lived on the boat next door, and had cheered up his weary and shabby middle-aged neighbour by taking her to Brighton for the day, had shortly afterwards gone back to Brighton and drowned himself. ‘But when I made him a character . . . I couldn’t bear to let him kill himself. That would have meant that he had failed in life, whereas, really, his kindness made him the very symbol of success in my eyes.’ Such private, fluctuating and unreconciled scales of value are at the heart of Fitzgerald’s depiction of human interaction.

And then there are the two little girls. Children in Fitzgerald’s fiction often show a disillusioned maturity lacking in their unhappy seniors. From the ten-year-old Christine Gipping in The Bookshop, who tells the childless widow Florence that ‘life has passed you by’, to the unflappable and ‘totally in charge’ twelve-year-old Dolly in The Beginning of Spring, they tend to be managers, speakers of truth and piercers of parental evasion. ‘They’re unusual kiddies,’ says Dolly’s visiting uncle; ‘I’m not sure that Nellie and me were ever permitted to join in quite as freely as that.’ The forebears of Fitzgerald’s fictional children can perhaps be found in the articulate nurseries and schoolrooms of Ivy Compton-Burnett, though to a friend who found them ‘precious’ Fitzgerald replied, ‘I don’t agree . . . They’re exactly like my own children, who always noticed everything.’ Even so, they can’t all be exactly like them, and they may owe something too to the self-possessed child actors whom Fitzgerald had taught, and whom she presents in At Freddie’s speaking whole paragraphs in dialect and shaping their brief careers with manic determination. Children, as she shows in Offshore, are inseparably both mimics and originals.

In Martha and Tilda, Fitzgerald wrote two of her most haunting and amusing juvenile roles. The only children in the book, they are also, as perpetual truants from school, her way of exploring its setting and its history. The six-year-old Tilda, whose whole world

Reviews for Offshore

[castlelass · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

“Biologically they could be said, as most tideline creatures are, to be ‘successful’. They were not easily dislodged. But to sell your craft, to leave the Reach, was felt to be a desperate step, like those of the amphibians when, in earlier stages of the world’s history, they took ground. Many of these species perished in the attempt.”

Set on a houseboat docked at Battersea Reach on the Thames, Nenna James lives on the Grace with her two daughters. Her estranged husband does not understand her desire to live on a barge, so he has been living apart from the family.

This is a character-driven novel with little plot. Nenna seems to be trying to organize her life but is not doing a good job of it. She has difficulty making decisions. Her daughters are often left to their own devices. The characters are eccentric. Maurice is storing stolen goods and Richard is an ex-soldier with an unhappy wife. Willis is an aging artist whose boat is sinking.

The title seems to be a metaphor for the lives of the people living at Battersea Reach. They are adrift and their lives are in disorder. This is a short book that won the Booker Prize in 1979. I liked it, especially the writing, but found the ending rather unsatisfying.

[sriddell_8 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Beautifully written, character driven and very atmospheric. But no plot, just a slice of life.

By the end of the book I didn't care about any of the characters. Their life choices seemed driven by depression or despair or just ennui.

A winner of the Booker prize, which makes me question how they pick their winners.

[ken5me5old5mate · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well, I read it and quite enjoyed it but I found it dated and a bit stifling. It felt like one of those books that are on the lists but make for unenjoyable reading and if they weren’t on the lists they certainly would not get anywhere near them today. I’m thinking of Lord Jim as being in the same sinking boat.

[theampersand · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I suspect that Offshore, had it been written today, would be unbearably quirky. A young, newly single mother and her two precocious young daughters live on a disused barge that serves as a houseboat, right on the Thames, along with a cast of colorful, eccentric, very British characters? Eeesh, that sounds awful. Somehow -- perhaps because she more-or-less lived it -- Penelope Fitzgerald's "Offshore" is great. It's a novel about living in that grey area between land and water, sure, but the other thread that I think runs through this book is courage in the face of adaptation: to abandonment, to old age, to the passage of time, and to decisions that can't be undone. Nenna's children, verbose and wise, seem to have adapted completely to their new lives, and think nothing of spending an entire day watching the gulls and boats, while their mother struggles with who she might be outside the context of her failing marriage. It also helps that Fitzgerald can really write. Her prose is fluid, and, considering the subject matter, it feels surprisingly gentle and natural: both her writing and the characters' lives seem to move with the gentle ebb and flow of the river. "Offshore" might also be one of the few books that I've ever read that employs lots of nautical jargon without seeming to go out of its way to confuse or annoy its readers. It describes a waterway that was once vital but has since become a sleepy backwater, a peaceful, nearly forgotten place in the middle of a modern city.In the end, this book's something of an exercise in nostalgia, or at least remembrance: its characters fight gamely to hold on to their places by the river, but their efforts seem doomed from the start. The book, written in the late seventies, looks back on a time and place that disappeared with the coming of the psychedelic sixties and with massive redevelopment. Nenna's children live a bit like gypsies, and the author seems to imply that the freedom they enjoy would be unthinkable these days. For all that, it's remarkably clear-eyed, a fond tribute to an ad-hoc community that flourished, in its way, before its inevitable disappearance.

[ebt1002 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was an odd but satisfying little novel about a small community of folks living on houseboats of varying stages of decay on Battersea Reach of the River Thames. Largely in focus is Nenna, a young mother of two girls (the girls steal the show), determined to win back her husband who refuses to set foot on the boat Grace. His contention that living on a leaky houseboat in the tidal flats of the Thames is crazy contrasts with Nenna's conviction that living anyplace is fine as long as they are together. This is not a romance and, while I experienced Nenna and her daughters as forefront, there are other equally colorful characters who hold their own for memorableness, humor, and charm. Oh, and we mustn't forget Stripey the cat. The Washington Post is quoted on the front cover of my edition as saying that Offshore is "the novelistic equivalent of a Turner watercolor." It wasn't until I finished that I understood this comparison. And it's true. The novel doesn't so much tell a story as capture a moment in time in the lives of its characters, with vivid colors and a committed impressionistic style. And the setting is central to the reader's enjoyment.

[pgchuis · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This short novel describes a few weeks in the lives of various individuals living in boats moored in tidal waters at Battersea Reach. They make up an informal community and look out for each other. Some of them live there seasonally; others because they cannot afford to live elsewhere. I thought Fitzgerald did a good job of describing life on the boats; the inconvenience and the constant battle with leaks and weathering.The first part of the book was gentle, almost dreamy (but never sweet) and then it got very sad. Bad things happened, although even then they were taken very calmly. The children, Tilda and Martha, provided a humorous stand that the story really needed. Nenna and Edward, their hopeless, stuck parents were the saddest part of the story for me. I hope Nenna did go back to Canada and leave the appalling Edward behind.I'm knocking half a star off for the totally unresolved, open ending.

[dianeham · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Picked this up recently and realized I read it in the distant past. The plot isn't fresh in my memory. I gave it 3.5 stars, assuming that if I loved it, I would probably have remebered it.

[janeajones · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Offshore won the Booker Prize for 1979. In a rather Chekhovian manner, it tells the story of the gradual dissolution of a community of houseboat dwellers on the Battersea Reach of the Thames. They are a motley crew -- a retired naval officer and his wife, who would rather be landside; Maurice, a friendly prostitute; Willis, a marine artist who must sell his leaky boat, and Nenna with her two daughters who refuse to go to school. Although I enjoyed the book, it hasn't stuck with me very well.

[libbromus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The kids, Tilda and Martha, are the best parts of this book. Fitzgerald's writing is unfussy and the pacing brisk; her characters so ordinary. Yet the way she writes about them and the circumstances surrounding them are not mundane or uninteresting. On the contrary, they're all so relatable, or if they're not, they're fascinating to observe. Her stories are quiet stories written about people living, existing, bursting, shattering, loving. They're untidy, self-repressed, and blossoming but in unexpected ways. I like her books the way they are - short and readable in a sitting or two. They are best taken that way.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fitzgerald's pleasantly low-key Booker winner from 1979. It's set in the early sixties, among a group of odd characters who live on decaying Thames barges moored at a boatyard in Chelsea. Like The Bookshop, it's a story centred around the very English concept of heroic failure (not coincidentally, several of the barges turn out to be Dunkirk veterans). The people living on the boats are all ignoring something unpleasant in their lives in the vain hope that it will go away. There's a commercially-unsuccessful rent-boy, a decrepit old painter in the Gulley Jimpson tradition, a former naval officer who doesn't want to let his wife turn him into a Home-Counties-stockbroker type, and Nenna, who's hiding from the failure of her marriage whilst her small daughters learn the skills of mudlarking and discover Swinging London in the nearby King's Road. We know from the beginning that it's a safe bet that at least one of the old boats is going to sink in the course of the story, but that's not really the point: the joy of the book is watching the ingenious and entertaining way Fitzgerald unfolds the stories of the various characters. As in The Bookshop, her very individual way of presenting small children is great fun. In her world, children are much more competent and self-assured than adults: the six-year-old Tilda, as dogmatic on the subject of ships, tides and the river as her modern coevals would be on the different species of dinosaurs, is a constant delight. And there are wonderful little throwaway lines everywhere. I loved the way she manages to cut sixties culture to size by describing the King's Road as "a playground for children", for instance (of course, she was writing this as a sixty-year-old during the era of punk and the Sloane Rangers, which probably gives you a bit of perspective).

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Echoes of Dickens and Conrad, this book is an enveloping read. Introduces the reader to life on a boat in the Thames during the early sixties. The ending is sudden and leaves the reader hanging. It ends to soon.

[lovinglit · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I can't say I was impressed by this book. Bewildered maybe, but little more than that. The story centers around Nenna, a separated mother of two girls, who lives on a small house boat on the Thames with her daughters. I wasn't sure she was the main character until over half way through this short novel though, such is the level of noise and confusion with other people in the novel. I suppose in this way the writing mirrors the lives of the assortment of river-dwellers, but I cant help thinking this is accidental rather than intentional on the part of the author. I suppose you could say that the lives of the characters are described as the story unfolds, but not in a way which made me at all interested in them. This had the unfortunate consequence of making a 140 page book seem 540 pages long. There were probably 2 passages that I read again on account of being impressed by the combination of words, but I need way more than that from my Booker Prize winning books, thank you very much.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Few authors so lovingly render the ephemeral. Fewer still appreciate that the ephemeral is the real, since all lives are lives of transition and flux, whether tidal or not. The inhabitants of the aging barges on Battersea Reach, afloat (usually) on the Thames, but anchored to the shore, however tenuously, have mostly not found their place yet in the burgeoning Swinging London of the 1960s. Nenna, circumstantially estranged from her husband, Edward, lives on Grace with her two girls, Martha and Tilda, both more at home on water than land. Maurice lives on Maurice, but perhaps more aptly lives on gaslight and “friends” he meets in bars in the city. Willis, an aging marine artist, wants to sell Dreadnought in order to spend his last days ashore, but to do so he can only show it at low tide when it is not leaking quite so much. And Richard, formerly of the Royal Navy (torpedoed 3 times), well-caulked owner of Lord Jim, oversees them all, literally, since Lord Jim is by far the largest craft in their midst. But all of them are fragile, if not already broken, and only the youngest, Tilda, actually thrives.In this short novel, Penelope Fitzgerald is masterfully concise, poignant, and honest. It is a world she knows intimately, having lived it before the incessant development of 1960s London swept the Reach clean. Yet here it comes fully to life again, vital, elemental, though perhaps just out of reach. It is a novel you can read in a brief span, but you will undoubtedly return to again and again. And each visit will be a rich harvest in the flotsam and jetsam of your reading life. Highly recommended, every time.

[mercury57 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Offshore never really got going for me. It felt as if Fitzgerald conceived the idea of a novel featuring a mixture of offbeat characters all of whom are at a turning point in their lives. Then to give it more appeal, she makes them live in houseboats in a less than desirable stretch of the River Thames. We trace their lives as they unravel or , in the case of one of the river dwellers, sink. But it’s difficult to engage with these characters or feel very interested in what happens to them because they are only sketchily depicted. Their eccentricities are not markedly eccentric, or even odd. The most interesting character for me was Maurice a male prostitute whose friendly nature is repeatedly taken advantage of who use his boat as a place to stash their stolen goods. But he is absent from the book for much of the time. Nenna, the central character, is a bohemian Canadian whose husband has left her and who is left quite literally struggling to keep things afloat. The scenes in which wanders shoeless through the streets of London late one night, are the most memorable. But it’s not enough to rescue the novel.According to a quote from the Observer on the back of my copy, Offshore is ‘a novel of crisp originality, lucid and expressive with some splendid bursts of satire’. Would that it were so. For me, the narrative sank deeper and deeper into the mud of the Thames, occasionally bobbing up for air to fool readers into thinking that something would now actually happen, only to subside even further into the depths. The experience left me feeling I’d been cheated.

[wandering_star_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Offshore is a slim and, on the surface, slight read. It tells the story of a few weeks in the lives of a group of people brought together by the fact that they all live on boats at the same moorings, on Battersea Reach in London. During these few weeks, momentous things happen to the characters - a young girl experiences her first love, a marriage falters, an affair tentatively begins, lives are ruined. But these are all narrated in such an understated way that it would be entirely possible to miss them if you weren't paying attention - and the personalities of the different characters are sketched out in the same style. One of the ways Fitzgerald achieves this is by not adding a lot of authorial explanation, so we have to interpret the significance.For example, a significant point in the faltering marriage takes place in the following exchange, embedded in a conversation about the neighbours:"I'm going home for a fortnight. It may be more than a fortnight - I don't really know how long.""When?""Oh, quite soon. I'll need some money".Richard avoided looking at her, for fear she should think he meant anything particular by it.Another sentence I really liked was: Richard patted himself to see that he had some matches on him, a gesture which appealed to Nenna, and walked off up the Embankment to catch a taxi. Again, the significant part is buried in a very normal sentence, and we have to figure out for ourselves why it was that Nenna had that reaction, and what that might mean.In many ways, the whole setting is a metaphor. The people who live on the boats inhabit a space between classifications, in the same way that the boats are a space between water and land. And to me, the book was also pointing out that even for those people who live - sensibly and normally - on land, the ground under our feet is pretty unstable, and we have to "take our chance with wind and tide".

[lmhtwb · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Having read Offshore twice, I'm still not sure what to make of it. The story centers on Nena, a mother of two daughters, who lives on a barge anchored in the Thames River. Her fellow boat owners, like their boats, are an odd assortment with flaws which may lead to their downfall (or sinking). The story, itself, has no clear plot. Instead it follows these people in brief threads which may lead to no resolution. In one sense, this is a collection of related short stories woven together by common characters. Unfortunately, with Nena being a possible exception, none of the characters are fully developed or explored.The writing, however, is finely done. This was a saving feature to me of this book.

[jeffome · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Just seemed an odd narrative about some odd people in odd situations, and the story never really went anywhere......odd. The few characters i sort of almost cared about never did anything, and the ones i wanted to know more about did even less....likewise the story. The end felt like i was mid-paragraph in the middle of a chapter part-way through a book....i thought maybe part of my book was missing.....the one positive note is that I am grateful for the chance to think about, however oddly and briefly, the fact that there are those living in boats in rivers.......felt like it had potential in the beginning but it ended up a rare overall disappointment in my reading.

[jklavanian_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved this book. Characters were interesting (especially Tilda -- as A.S. Byatt wrote in the introduction to Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris, Fitzgerald got Tilda right).

[eglinton_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well-written, concise, and evocative. The milieu of a down-at-heel backside to '60s Swinging London is conveyed through a medley of credible but dreary characters. This period and the author's staid prose style give lots of the language and references a pleasantly dated feel ('TCP', 'anorak', 'Officer' addressing a policeman). Some characters' motivations may seem a bit dated too, but without the charm gained from a completely alien setting (Enlightenment Prussia in 'The Blue Flower', to take her well-known example). So these lame and defeated characters on the Thames barges of 'Offshore' don't think like us, but are close enough in time and place for it to be harder for the modern reader to empathise. TO put it more simply, the characters are not very likeable (and this is a character-driven novel).

[lauralkeet · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

"Battersea Reach, ladies and gentlemen. On your right, the artistic colony. Folks live on those boats like they do on the Seine, it's the artist's life they're leading there. Yes, there's people living on those boats." (p. 16)Along the banks of the Thames, a small group of boats sit permanently anchored, serving as home not to artists, but to a ragtag group of residents who, for various reasons, have chosen to live on the river instead of on land. Their de facto leader is Richard, of the Lord Jim, by far the best-kept boat in the group. Grace is home to Nenna and her two daughters. Her husband has left them and the girls attend school only occasionally. One boat's owner allows stolen goods to be held on board. Another is trying to sell his boat, and hopes none of the other residents will tell prospective buyers about the leak. The characters were largely misfits, with humorous quirks. I was sympathetic towards Nenna, with her general awkwardness, her difficulty raising young daughters alone, and and her inability to rescue her marriage. Unfortunately however, the central theme of the novel eluded me. There were also several loose ends and incongruities in the plot. It was a light and sometimes pleasant read, but I am positively baffled as to how it won the Booker Prize. Ah well, at least it was short.

[lman_45 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If, in your reading material, you appreciate a sublime but deliberate choice of wording which, in its calculated brevity, paints a magnificent panorama, then Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore will utterly delight – as it did me.As plain as it is titled, this book is the briefest glimpse – a snapshot in essence – into a chapter of the lives of a disparate group of barge-dwellers; who actually live ‘offshore’ on the Thames River, in the shadow of Battersea Bridge, London. And much akin with the river itself, their lives are as ordered, oft-times, by the tides that control their houseboats, and as chaotic as living on a seething, ever-changing, moving mass of water can be – amidst the interminable consternation of the surrounding land-dwellers. Drawn together by their individuality, this unique little community, full of eclectic but endearing eccentrics, is thus peculiarly-shaped, and irrevocably altered, by the every choice of dwelling in such absurdity brings – the events which occur almost preordained in their inevitability.In this book, there is so very much to like in so very little. This is my second Penelope Fitzgerald – and I have come to realise that Ms Fitzgerald is a consummate word-smith. Everything in this book is slightly askew, and intentionally so! Every word is chosen with a deliberation that in its conciseness elaborates, and discloses, such a welter of information and such colourful characterisations – which you know could never be conveyed as well, and would undoubtedly be lost, within a larger body of work – resulting in a superbly-crafted inference on the society of the time. By invoking a delicate humour on every page, this accentuates the underlying poignancy of the situation; detailing the random, indiscriminate thoughts of the barge residents - from wistful Nenna and her precocious brood to ex-navy Richard and his desire for everything to be ship-shape - discloses a complexity and a quality, a warmth, to this motley group inhabiting such a fascinating world. But best of all, in regards to this marvellous book, is the respect Ms Fitzgerald pays her reader. She knows that in her succinct exposition the reader will grasp what is left unsaid; that a suggestion and a nuance, a dry wit, is all that is required to reveal the entire picture, and to be completely understood. There is a line on every page in Offshore that I could quote to exemplify the many, many beautiful constructs the author uses. This book made me laugh-out-loud, made me despair and made me ponder; made me return again and again to the immaculately-created phrasings, and in the end, left me wanting much more. And, like the inhabitants of Battersea Reach, I am left floundering, and in two minds, and all at sea with the world – and quite ‘off’! Just remarkable!(May 1, 2009)

[writestuff_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Penelope Fitzgerald’s Booker Prize winning novel Offshore is set in the 1960’s along the Thames and introduces a cast of eccentric and unique characters whose lives criss-cross and intersect as they go about their days on the worn out barges of the area. There is Richard, a retired navy man whose desire for organization unites the others, and Maurice who receives stolen goods, and Willis whose boat Dreadnought is fated for tragedy. But, it is perhaps Nenna who is the most interesting - a woman who has been abandoned by her husband and is trying to raise two precocious, young girls. Tilly, the youngest daughter, loves barge life and her courageous and lively spirit is infectious.As Fitzgerald’s novella progresses, it is Nenna’s domestic unhappiness which unites the characters, and it is Tilly’s innocent optimism which creates the irony in the story.Fitzgerald’s story is full of a black humor and her writing is clear and descriptive. Offshore feels much like a character study or a long short story, and its ending is both unexpected and unresolved.This was my first Fitzgerald novel, and I appreciated her wonderful use of language and development of the characters. But when I turned the last page I felt oddly disconnected and disappointed. I wanted more, yet there was no more to be had. Offshore is strongly literary in style and it is a quick read. It whet my appetite for more of Penelope Fitzgerald’s work.

[jburlinson_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Winner of the 1979 Booker Prize, this novel sparked a mild controversy, with some critics alleging that the jury went overboard for a minor, even insubstantial, offering. Short, it is. Low-calorie, it is not. The book deals with people of all ages who live in barges or houseboats on the Thames, quite literally between the land and the sea. And they (and by extension we?) are in transition between one mode of life and another, without really knowing how (or even whether) to undergo the transformation. Scenes are short, often a paragraph or two, sometimes only a sentence or a fragment. Perspective shifts from character to character, but the reader is never confused or less than fully engaged. Dialog is exact and yet suggestive. Nearly every page contains a felicitous, original touch. Just a single example, one that tickles me – of a German teenager who briefly spends an afternoon with one of the houseboat families, Fitzgerald writes: “With a faint smile the young Count turned to thank his saviour, while some colour stealed, stole, back into his pale cheeks.” Fitzgerald certainly knows the correct past tense of “to steal”, but she bleeps the reader that the German boy is not quite sure, but wants to be, just as he wants to be considered less insecure than, in fact, he is. All this subtlety for a character that appears for just a few pages. But, then, for Fitzgerald, there are no minor characters.

[gwendolyndawson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Persuasively captures the community existing among the houseboat dwellers on the river in London. Unflinching, courageous, and beautifully written.

[millerker76 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wonderful. A slim book. Set among a group of staunch individuals whose homes are reworked barges on the Thames.Read it twice. Will start reading her others. The characters are memorable and sympathetic, the protaganist's two girls are simply unforgettable. A pleasure.