"Offshore" by Penelope Fitzgerald

Winner of the Booker Prize in 1979.

An exploration of the liminal lives of a group of houseboat owners on Battersea Reach in the tidal Thames in the early 1960s, as Swinging London gets underway. Richard, retired from the Royal Navy, lives with his wife (who longs for a normal house) on a converted minesweeper. Maurice lives on his own on a dutch barge and most nights he brings home a customers from the local pub; his boat is also used by Harry to store stolen goods. Willis, a 65 year-old artist, is trying to sell his leaky boat before it sinks. Nenna's boat is home to herself and her two daughters, 12 and 6; her hopeless husband can't bear living abroad and has left her to cope alone. Woodie and Mrs Woodie are an elderly couple who support the others through the various crises.

The constant reference to leaks, to the need for continual maintenance, and the rats, certainly put paid to any romantic notions I might have had about living on a boat.

The book refers several times to "the short uneasy period between land and water" (Ch 7) and the characters do seem to be living in a kind of limbo. The epigraph is taken from Dante and there is a reference to the river that souls must cross to enter the classical underworld: "Rat-ridden and neglected, it was a wharf still. The river's edge, where Virgil's ghosts held out their arms in longing for the farther shore, and Dante, as a living man, was refused passage by the ferryman ... there, surely, is a place to stop and reflect." (Ch 1) There are a lot of endings, from the three drowned sailors seen by little Tilda, to a sinking ship, to the death of a marriage, to an attempted murder. All the characters seem to be betwixt and between, living lives of transience, and those who live on land in proper houses, such as the priest, disapprove. I suspect that the author is saying that life itself is impermanent and that places that remind us of this are indeed places to "stop and reflect". 

This feeling of liminality is reflected in the chronology. The book seems to be set in late 1961 (the spring of 1962 is said to be in 6 months time and Nenna married in 1949 and her eldest child in 12) but Heinrich wants to see "Swinging London" which is generally agreed to have started in 1964. This anachronism seems appropriate when you live on the threshold. And Nenna is asked (in an imaginary court trial), "'Look here, is it Wednesday or Thursday?' 'I don't know, Ed, whichever you like'." (Ch 3). Time is unimportant in a liminal space. Again, in chapter 5, the author describes the old mother of Willis as "perdurable" which means imperishable but later in the sentence we discover that the woman has died of cancer; this seems to be a deliberate oxymoron.

It is, however, paced just like a classic novel: the key turning point comes almost exactly in the centre of the book.

 Have I ever mentioned how much I hate it when authors write in a foreign language? This novel's epigraph (that's the quotation at the start to you and me) is "che mena il vento, e che batte la pioggia/ e che s'incontran con si aspre lingue" which are two lines of mediaeval Tuscan taken from Dante's Inferno (canto 11) which mean "those whom the wind drives, and those whom the rain batters, and those who encounter one another with such bitter words." 

Selected Quotes:

• "Duty is what no-one else will do at the moment." (Ch 1)
• "It's not the kind who inherit the earth, it's the poor, the humble, and the meek. ... the kind ... get kicked in the teeth." (Ch 6)
• "It was like one of those terrible sights of the racecourse or the battle field where wallowing living beings persevere dumbly in their duty although mutilated beyond repair." (Ch 7)
• "It's my last chance. While I've still got it I can take it out and look at it and know I still have it. If that goes, I've nothing left to try." (Ch 7)
• "I can't for the life of me see why, if you really feel something, it's got to be talked about." (Ch 8)
• "He disliked comparisons, because they made you think about more than one thing at a time." (Ch 8)
• "All distances are the same to those who don't meet." (Ch 10)
• "The James family seemed to have few possessions. Mrs Woodie felt half inclined to lend her some, so as to have more to sort out and put away." (Ch 10)

The plot might be minimal but this is a book of beautifully drawn characters in a very special world.

February 2024; 181 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God