Ali's review - 1979 Offshore - Penelope Fitgerald

 This is only the fourth Penelope Fitzgerald novel that I have read, and I have to say straight off – I enjoyed it enormously. A very busy weekend has forced me to read it slowly – which I am glad of as I have been able to savour it. It is after all a pretty short book.
A quote on the back cover of this edition caught my eye – so I must share it.

“Reading a Penelope Fitzgerald novel is like being taken for a ride in a peculiar kind of car. Everything is of top quality – the engine, the coachwork and the interior all fill you with confidence. Then after a mile or so, someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window”
Sebastian Faulkes.

A mixed group of people live on houseboats on the Thames at Battersea Reach in the early 1960’s. They are each temporarily lost, often eccentric and have come to belong and rely on one another. Willis, a naval artist who has never been to sea, is hoping to sell his boat The Dreadnought before she inevitably sinks. Richard an ex-navy man dominates the Reach as does his much larger boat, while his wife Laura hates the boats and frequently returns to her upper-middle class family. Richard and Laura are the only inhabitants of the Reach with any money. Maurice, a male prostitute, and receiver of stolen goods has become particularly good friends with Nenna, who abandoned by her husband is living on the boat Grace with her two daughters Martha and Tilda.

“During the small hours, tipsy Maurice became an oracle, ambiguous, wayward, but impressive. Evan his voice changed a little. He told the sombre truths of the light-hearted, betraying in a casual hour what was never intended to be shown. If the tide was low the two of them watched the gleams on the foreshore, at half tide they heard the water chuckling, waiting to lift the boats, at flood tide they saw the river as a powerful god, bearded with the white foam of detergents, calling home the twenty-seven lost rivers of London, sighing as the night declined.”

The two girls forage along the foreshore – and don’t always attend school. They explore Battersea and Chelsea, but are more at home on the river. Six year old Tilda wonderfully old for her years is a spiky breath of fresh air.

“Tilda knew very well that the river could be dangerous. Although she had become a native of the boats, and pitied the tideless and ratless life of the Chelsea inhabitants, she respected the water and knew that one could die within sight of the Embankment.”

The character’s relationships are altered by the changes in their circumstances, the world of this disparate little community is under threat. The reader senses this fragility of a way of life, from the very start. Fitzgerald perfectly pitches this beautiful little novel. The tidal flow of the river, the rise and fall of the boats, the mud along the river bank – the interactions of her characters come together to create a wonderful sense of time and place.
I have added these quotes from the book because I loved the Fitzgerald’s writing. The descriptions of the river are particularly good I think. This book is a real little gem.

Review - Offshore - 1979

Penelope Fitzgerald has been compared to D H Lawrence or Evelyn Waugh for her ability to depict the subtle interactions between her characters. Two of her novels - The Beginning of Spring and The Gate of Angels - were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. With that pedigree in mind, and the eulogy from Sebastian Faulks on the back of my copy of Offshore - the novel with which  she did win the Booker in 1979, I was in hope of a good experience.   

According to Faulks 'reading a Penelope Fitzgerald novel is like being taken for a ride in a peculiar kind of car. Everything is of top quality - the engine, the coachwork and the interior all fill you with confidence. Then, after a mile or so, someone grows the steering wheel out of the window. 

Now I’ve finished Offshore, I’m left wondering whether Faulks was actually talking about a totally different book. I kept waiting for the moment when the unexpected would actually happen. By the end, even a chip packet being thrown out of the car window might have felt like progress. But even that was denied. 

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.

A version of this review was first posted on Booker Talk

Marie's Review- Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald

Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald. Published 1979 by Collins. This edition published 2003 by Everyman's Library, Hardcover.

Winner of the Booker Prize in 1979, Offshore is quiet, short novel about a group of eccentric characters living in houseboats on the Thames River in London. The main focus is on Nenna and her children, precocious Tilda and milder Martha; Martha longs for normalcy while Tilda embraces the chaos of houseboat river living. Grace is the name of their boat; Nenna's husband, Edward, has left them. Richard is a retired Royal Naval Reserve officer, very comme il faut, who lives on a very nice boat. His wife, the beautiful Laura, is discontented with barge life. Maurice is a small-time criminal and male prostitute.  A pair of minor tragedies upset this delicately poised group and it slowly disintegrates.

Life on the Battersea Reach is a world apart from life on the shore, with its own rules and codes of conduct. Some find it quite suitable, like Nenna and Richard, to whom she is attracted. Others, like Laura and Martha, want a so-called normal life on land. Nenna's husband Edward is harmless and feckless and the two just can't seem to find common ground. Meanwhile their daughters are growing up and involved in little intrigues of their own.

I really enjoyed Offshore. It's a little gem about personalities and lifestyles intersecting and mingling like slow-moving driftwood at the water's edge. While short, Offshore is not a quick read but rather requires a careful and attentive reader. The characters are vivid and detailed; the setting is unusual and fascinating. I re-read it as soon as I finished just to savor its little nuances and details. A tiny masterpiece, Offshore should be on the shelf of every reader of literary fiction.

You can see this review on my book blog Boston Bibliophile.

Trevor's Review of Fitzgerald's Offshore

I noticed that most of the reviewers here didn't like Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore, so I'm posting my dissenting opinion: I loved it! I've copied below the heart of the review I posted on my own blog (you can read the whole thing by clicking here).

Offshore begins with a sly attention grabber:

‘Are we to gather that Dreadnought is asking us all to do something dishonest?’ Richard asked.

Dreadnought nodded, glad to have been understood so easily.

It turns out that Dreadnought is one of several houseboats in Battersea Reach on the Thames. Its owner is Willis, a sixty-five-year-old painter, and he has plans to sell his boat and move to land where he can live with his widowed sister. However, the boat is old and not worth much — but, perhaps it could be worth a bit more . . .

Richard, captain of the boat Lord Jim, is the de facto leader of the small community set in Battersea Reach. It probably goes without saying that Fitzgerald’s characters are people living on the fringe. Living neither on the land nor on the sea, these are characters who don’t fit well in society. Besides Dreadnought and Lord Jim (and others), this community also includes Maurice and Grace. Maurice lives on Maurice (the boat used to be named Dondeschipolschuygen IV, but Maurice renamed it when he found out everyone referred to each other by their boat’s name). Maurice’s male clients are there most of the night, but it’s the man who stores his merchandise on the boat that causes the most fear. Nenna lives on Grace with her two young daughters, Tilda and Martha. When Nenna’s husband, Edward, returned from South America a failure, his wife’s situation on the boat was still below him.

Offshore revolves around these strange, basically lonely characters. They frequently encounter each other, they are friendly, they do form part of a community, but the loneliness, the separateness remains. And that is all due to Fitzgerald’s wonderful prose. The following quote, for example, says so much about Nenna and her two daughters. On the surface, it sounds somewhat hopeful, as they like to see their situation. But there’s a desperation beyond the obvious. There’s an intimation into what could happen when Martha and Tilda grow up a bit more.

Martha and Tilda were in the position of having no spending money, but this was less important when they were not attending school and were spared the pains of comparison, and they felt no bitterness against their mother, because she hadn’t any either. Nenna believed, however, that she would have some in the spring, when three things would happen, each, like some melting ice-floes, slowly moving the next one on. Edward would come and live on Grace, which would save the rent he was paying on his rooms at present; the girls, once they were not being prayed for at the grotto, would agree to go back to the nuns; and with Tilda at school she could go out herself and look for a job.

Nenna is, in many ways, the central character. The other characters have their unique stories, but more time is spent on Nenna, which is proper. Not only is Nenna’s story intriguing but Fitzgerald has given her a fabulous interior dialogue:

. . . Nenna’s thoughts, whenever she was alone, took the form of a kind of perpetual magistrate’s hearing, in which her own version of her marriage was shown as ridiculously simple and demonstrably right, and then, almost exactly at the same time, as incontrovertibly wrong. Her conscience, too, held, quite uninvited, a separate watching brief, and intervened in the proceedings to read statements of an unwelcome nature.

For glorious pages Nenna is interrogated by this judge as her husband, the plaintiff, sits in the background. Though this goes on for pages, Fitzgerald doesn’t overdo it. This technique doesn’t take over Nenna’s personality, and it still allows Nenna’s sad story to be told.

Though short, this book actually took me quite a bit of time to read. The story and the characters are complex. Though Fitzgerald’s sentences hold this complexity well, they are intricate and complex in and of themselves and take some time to digest. The book demanded time. But it was time so well spent. I loved this book.

Matthew's Review - Offshore

On the river Thames, there lives a collection of people in houseboats. There's Richard, married to Laura. There's Maurice, a male prostitute. There's Nenna, a single mother of two. There's Willis, an artist. They all reach a crisis, and deal with it.

I hated this book. Hated it. I wasn't sure at any point if this was a comedy or a tragedy. The tone is so off putting that I struggled to finish a 140 page novel.

Penelope Fitzgerald, the author, introduces a sizable cast, considering the book's short length, and she only bothers to develop maybe two or three of them. The characters are mostly interchangeable, especially in voice. Every single person seems to have the same stilted distant dialogue, with oddly formal vocabulary, including the eleven year old. But even the eleven year old can be switched with the male prostitute, and the results are the same.

I know what the book is about: people living in between worlds, the land and the sea, their divided selves. It's not good when the exceedingly helpful dust jacket does all the thematic heavy lifting. Only at a couple points does Fitzgerald allude to her thesis - no, allude isn't the word for it. Perhaps a better way of saying it is that when Fitzgerald mentions her theme, she points to it with neon signs.

I think the major problem of this book, the one from which all other complaints stem, is the novel's length. It's either too short or too long. If Fitzgerald had written another 100 pages, and drawn her characters out a little more, I probably would have liked it better. Conversely, if this novel had been trimmed to short story length, I would have no doubt loved it for its minimalism. But Fitzgerald tries to have it both ways, striving for minimalism, but complicating it with detail.

I hated Offshore. I thought the tone was so off putting as to make the novel interminable, an amazing feat for a 140 page novel. I hated the interchangeable characters. I hated the forced themes. I'm not even convinced Fitzgerald even said anything relevant about the duality of her own cast. I will not be reading another novel by her.

Looking at the novels shortlisted in 1979, I can see why the Booker Prize was awarded to this slight, disposable volume: there were no alternatives.

Laura's Review - Offshore

Offshore
Penelope Fitzgerald
140 pages


"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. ( )

My original review can be found here.

Offshore - Wendy's Review

The barge-dwellers, creatures neither of firm land nor water, would have liked to be more respectable than they were. They aspired towards the Chelsea shore, where, in the early 1960’s, many thousands lived with sensible occupations and adequate amounts of money. 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. - from Offshore, page 10 -

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.

Tilda cared nothing for the future, and had, as a result, a great capacity for happiness. - from Offshore, page 27 -

Tilda, in spite of her lucid gray eyes, showing clarity beneath clarity, which challenged the nuns not to risk scandalising the innocent, had often been in disfavour. She was known to be one of the little ones who had filled in their colouring books irreverently, making our Lord’s beard purple, or even green, largely, to be sure, because she never bothered to get hold of the best crayons first. - from Offshore, page 41 -

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.

Interesting side note: people are still living on the antique barges on the Thames.

Rose City Reader's Comments on Offshore and The God of Small Things

I recently read two Booker Prize winners, Offshore (1979) and The God of Small Things (1997), when taking a break from slogging through Henry James’s, The Ambassadors.

In one of those oddly common instances of literary serendipidy, Offshore and TGST were similar in several respects — both were by women, about women, and involved atypical, insular communities. Offshore is about a group of misfits living in converted barges on the Thames river in London. TGST is about a Syrian Christian family in a small town in India.

Also, both were excellent entertainment, although in different ways. Offshore was a little gem that offered a glimpse into this secret world on the river before ending without tying up loose ends. TGST addresses bigger issues, has a more complicated plot, and uses wonderful, Nabokov-like word play. Both have stuck with me.

Rose City Reader's notes re: Offshore and The God of Small Things

I hate to interupt Trevor's impressive collection of reviews! Especially just for a couple of light observations.

I've been on a Booker roll lately. I recently read two Booker Prize winners, Offshore (1979) and The God of Small Things (1997), when taking a break from slogging through Henry James’s, The Ambassadors.

In one of those oddly common instances of literary serendipidy, Offshore and TGST were similar in several respects — both were by women, about women, and involved atypical, insular communities. Offshore is about a group of misfits living in converted barges on the Thames river in London. TGST is about a Syrian Christian family in a small town in India.

Also, both were excellent entertainment, although in different ways. Offshore was a little gem that offered a glimpse into this secret world on the river before ending without tying up loose ends. TGST addresses bigger issues, has a more complicated plot, and uses wonderful, Nabokov-like word play. Both have stuck with me.