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Offshore: A Novel, by Penelope Fitzgerald
Free PDF Offshore: A Novel, by Penelope Fitzgerald
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Winner of the Booker Prize
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.”
“A marvelous achievement: strong, supple, humane, ripe, generous, and graceful.” —Sunday Times
- Sales Rank: #115132 in eBooks
- Published on: 1998-04-03
- Released on: 2013-06-11
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
Offshore possesses perfect, very odd pitch. In just over 130 pages of the wittiest and most melancholy prose, Penelope Fitzgerald limns 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 center 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. --Kerry Fried
From Publishers Weekly
Housed in once-seaworthy barges on the Thames, half-a-dozen irrepressibly quirky people and their collective rat-fearing cat give each otherand the charmed readeradvice and comfort. Chief among them are Richard, whose boat and person are always shipshape, and Nenna, whose aren't, partly because her husband Edward refuses to live on a boat but mainly because she has reached that vulnerable point in her maternal affairs at which she recognizes the superior capability of her 12-year-old daughter Martha. It is Martha who gets supper on the table and calls Tilda, six, down from the mast, where she sits declaiming passages from courtly tales of kings and queens. For all except Richard, who goes to a proper job at nine o'clock every morning, life is so precarious that old Willis, the marine painter, must sell his decrepit boat (at low tide, when the leaks won't be noticed), and young Maurice, Nenna's best friend, must eke out his living as a male prostitute by receiving stolen goods. In short order, matters take several ironic turns that disrupt the carefree, if scrubby, ease of barge life. Fitzgerald, whose Innocence was published to acclaim here last year, won the Booker Prize in 1979 with this earlier novel. With economical prose and wonderfully vivid dialogue, she fashions a wry, fast-moving story whose ambiguous ending is exactly right, although it leaves readers (and one of the characters) hanging.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Fitzgerald was red hot in 1998. Not only did her most recent work, The Blue Flower, win top fiction honors at the National Book Critics Circle Awards, but several of her older titles were reprinted. Among them was this 1979 Booker Prize winner, which follows a bevy of characters living in houseboats on the Thames. (Classic Returns, LJ 5/1/98)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
41 of 44 people found the following review helpful.
A haiku of a novel
By A Customer
The first from a writer who believes less is more. Her work does more with the nuance of a sentence than most writers accomplish in a chapter. A review below complains that she's no A. S. Byatt, and it's true. If you like a lot of exposition and dense writing, this is not for you. But the beautifully described world of the waterfront, and the wafting lives that intersect there made this an enduring work in my imagination.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
lack of good details and descriptions
By Michelle McCarty
There was no character development, lack of good details and descriptions, hard to read.
32 of 35 people found the following review helpful.
This should have been one Booker Award amongst many
By taking a rest
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 span of time of just 15 years. 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 colorful as her books. The majority of the book takes place on boats, boats that never move. Boats that would normally form there 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 her exactitude, and delivered works that are absolutely complete.
The Booker Judges deemed this work "flawless", they were correct.
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