Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57129 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Offshore possesses perfect, very odd pitch. In just over 130 pages of the wittiest and most melancholy prose, Penelope Fitzgerald illuminates the lives of "creatures neither of firm land nor water"--a group of barge-dwellers in London's Battersea Reach, circa 1961. One man, a marine artist whose commissions have dropped off since the war, is attempting to sell his decrepit craft before it sinks. Another, a dutiful businessman with a bored, mutinous wife, knows he should be landlocked but remains drawn to the muddy Thames. A third, Maurice, a male prostitute, doesn't even protest when a criminal acquaintance begins to use his barge as a depot for stolen goods: "The dangerous and the ridiculous were necessary to his life, otherwise tenderness would overwhelm him."

At the centre of the novel--winner of the 1979 Booker Prize--are Nenna and her truant six- and 11-year-old daughters. The younger sibling "cared nothing for the future, and had, as a result, a great capacity for happiness." But the older girl is considerably less blithe. "Small and thin, with dark eyes which already showed an acceptance of the world's shortcomings," Fitzgerald writes, she "was not like her mother and even less like her father. The crucial moment when children realise that their parents are younger than they are had long since been passed by Martha."

Their father is farther afield. Unable to bear the prospect of living on the Grace, he's staying in Stoke Newington, part of London but a lost world to his wife and daughters. Meanwhile, Nenna spends her time going over incidents that seem to have led to her current situation, and the matter of some missing squash racquets becomes of increasing import. Though she is peaceful by nature, experience and poverty are wearing Nenna down. Her confidante Maurice, after a momentary spell of optimism, also returns to his life of little expectation and quiet acceptance: "Tenderly responsive to the self-deceptions of others, he was unfortunately too well able to understand his own."

Penelope Fitzgerald views her creations with deep but wry compassion. Having lived on a barge herself, she offers her expert spin on the dangers, graces and whimsies of river life. Nenna, too, has become a savant, instantly recognizing on one occasion that the mud encasing the family cat is not from the Reach. This "sagacious brute" is almost as complex as his human counterparts, constantly forced to adjust her notions of vermin and authority. Though Stripey is capable of catching and killing very young rats, the older ones chase her. "The resulting uncertainty as to whether she was coming or going had made her, to some extent, mentally unstable."

As always, Fitzgerald is a master of the initially bizarre juxtaposition. Adjacent sentences often seem like delightful non sequiturs--until they flash together in an effortless evocation of character, era and human absurdity. Nenna recalls, for instance, how the buds had dropped off the plant her husband rushed to the hospital when Martha was born. She "had never criticized the bloomless azalea. It was the other young mothers in the beds each side of her who had laughed at it. That had been 1951. Two of the new babies in the ward had been christened Festival." Tiny comical epiphanies such as these have caused the author to be dubbed a "British miniaturist". Yet the phrase utterly misses the risks Fitzgerald's novellas take, the discoveries they make and the endless pleasures they provide.

Synopsis
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 1979 A lovely new cover reissue of Penelope Fitzgerald's award-winning comic novel. Offshore is a dry, genuinely funny novel, set among the houseboat community who rise and fall with the tide of the Thames on Battersea Reach. Living between land and water, they feel as if they belong to neither...Maurice, a male prostitute, is the sympathetic friend to whom all the others turn. Nenna loves her husband but can't get him back; her children run wild on the muddy foreshore. She feels drawn to Richard, the ex-RNVR city man whose converted minesweeper dominates the Reach. Is he sexually attractive because he can fold maps the right way? With this and other questions waiting to be answered, Offshore offers a delightful glimpse of the workings of an eccentric community.

Customer Reviews

Ashendon Book Group says...
This book follows the lives of a group of people living on house boats (redundant Dutch Barges) on the Thames at Battersea Reach. There is no real plot - it is more of a snapshot of a point in time of the characters' lives ("Chekovian" says Sue Roberts). Penelope Fitzgerald uses her words VERY carefully and with great economy and with great success. This is a book to read a second time in order to appreciate the subtlety and depth within it. The more we discussed the book the more we found to talk about and just couldn't stop ourselves digging out quotes and lines. Somehow in such a short book there is so much detail - though no colour. The book is a testament to the 1960's - women who can't fold maps, order a drink in a pub, draw corks, fold the times, hammer nails in or strike matches toward themselves. And single parent families are not the norm - they are socially shocking. Would we recommend it? It's not a happy book, it's quite depressing, it's grey, the humour is deepest dark, it's left to you to decide about the people; it's interesting, it's crammed full of great reading. YES almost without exception we agreed that of course we would recommend it.

Taut novella of a microcosm of society
Fitzgerald's talent lies in the way she can make her characters interact and "live". Although less than two hundred pages Offshore captures the spirit of a whole host of people all very different and unique. From the poverty stricken Nenna and family to the affluent Richard and Laura via the shady nature of Maurice's occupation- Fitzgerald runs the gauntlet of different problems and outlooks. Fitzgerald never directly mentions the meaning, behind these characters' lives, but we understand more, through her writing, about love, loss and social difference.
The cold, mist and mud can all be felt through Fitzgerald's descriptions of the Thames along with the warmth the humanity of the barges' inhabitants. Within the day-to-day workings of the barge dwellers is a story of jealousy and doom which surfaces slowly during the novel and emerges at the climax in an unforgettable end that is truly chilling.
What makes Offshore imperfect is its limited length. Although a novella often has the tautness and direction longer novels lack it can often be at the sacrifice of material that would draw the reader closer into the fictional world. This is the case in Offshore- although all the characters are precisely defined and the story line never deviates away from the path, it seems that we never get close enough to Nenna and co to really feel for them. In a way it seems such vivid and finely crafted characters are wasted.
Nevertheless, Fitzgerald has written an encompassing and bittersweet tale of people living in unordinary circumstances.

This should have been one Booker Award amongst many
The novels have all been read, but the stories continue. This was the last of Ms. Fitzgerald's novels that I had yet to read, and was also the only work of hers than won the prestigious Booker Award. Her other works that were short listed for the award were "The Bookshop", "The Gate Of Angels", and "The Beginning Of Spring". In a writing career that produced 9 works of fiction, to have placed 4 of the 9 as finalists, and to win once is extraordinary. These novels, 3 works of non-fiction, and a collection of short stories, were all published in a period of time of just 15 years in length. It is certainly selfish, but I wish she began sharing her work before she was 69, in the end it does not matter, as the body of work she did produce will keep her in print for many lifetimes to come.

Ms. Fitzgerald wrote short novels; in, "Offshore", she has compressed the story into a space that is at once confining and as colorful as her books. The majority of the book takes place on boats, boats that never move. Boats that would normally form their own tiny area of culture, but this is Ms. Fitzgerald, so as is normally the case conventional measurement has nothing to do with the scope of the story. This time out she seems to test just how far she can compress the space, the number of people and their stories.

This sometimes-floating living location is a raving contradiction in space. Boats and barges meant to be mobile are not, nature can use the tide of the Thames to raise and then settle them down once again, but any motion more abrupt, and the small fragile world is put in peril. A motionless boat is a contradiction in terms. A boat is inanimate, but "it" knows that being chained in place is unnatural, or perhaps all the life that clings to the sides of these vessels are nature's disaffected elements, determined to find a way to undo what should not have been done.

"I never do anything deliberately", is spoken by one character, but is appropriate for several. This group of eclectic eccentrics may possibly be the greatest menagerie the writer ever conjured for one tale.

I cannot begin to pick a favorite from her novels; she is as excellent as she is consistent. I do know this, that unlike her characters, Ms. Fitzgerald chose every word deliberately, built every sentence with exactitude, and delivered works that are absolutely complete.

The Booker Judges deemed this work "flawless", they were correct.