Books Read: Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

Not her best, yet still magnificent.

If I were going to binge-read an author at the moment (apart from old mate Stephen King), it would be Elizabeth Taylor. Right behind her would be Penelope Fitzgerald. Several years back, I read the wonderful Human Voices, and since then I’ve been meaning to dip back into Fitzgerald. Thank the literary lords, then, that Andy Miller randomly pulled Offshore out of the Gilded Amaretti Posh Bingo Tin of Destiny.¹ And while I appreciate that Offshore, despite winning the Booker in 1979, isn’t the high point of Fitzgerald’s work (lots of people love The Bookshop and The Blue Flower), it’s still a damn fine book. Funny. Poignant. And a little bit sad.

If you haven’t read the back-cover blurb, the novel’s opening is bewildering. Take the first two sentences:

“‘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’s the literary equivalent of far-future science fiction with its neologisms and portmanteaus. In fact, if this had been written by Iain Banks, you would assume one of the People was questioning a sentient spacecraft. And actually… that’s not a million miles from the truth. It becomes clear that we’re in the middle of a meeting between the owners of boats (not spacecraft) moored on the Thames. The convention is for each person to be named after their vessel. Dreadnought’s owner is the elderly but lovable Willis, a marine artist whose only source of income are his painting. He’s looking to sell his boat so he can return to the mainland and move in with his widowed sister. The issue is that his boat isn’t even remotely seaworthy. Thus, the meeting.

The other owners include the aforementioned Richard Blake, owner of Lord Jim, meeting chair and the only one with a “proper” job (he works at an investment firm); Woodie, owner of Rochester and the former director of a small recording company; Maurice, owner of Maurice (he changed the boat’s name from Dondeschiepolschuygen IV) and a rent boy who picks up men from the nearby pub; and, finally, Nenna James, the only female owner, who lives on Grace with her daughters Martha and Tilda. Nenna purchased Grace while her husband, Edward, was away in Panama working for a construction firm. He’s now back in England, but refuses to live on the boat.

The bulk of the novel centres on the fractured relationship between Nenna and Edward, and the impact it’s having on their daughters. Twelve-year-old Martha has stopped going to school after the nuns “announced there would be a special rosary every morning… [where] the whole Junior School would pray together that Martha and Tilda’s Daddy should come back to them.” As for six-year-old Tilda, if you look precocious up in the dictionary, you’ll find her picture. She takes to Battersea Reach like she was birthed on the wharf. An early scene of Father Watson’s less-than-inspiring attempt to convince Nenna to send the girls back to school is a wonderful example of Fitzgerald’s droll sense of humour.

While the spine of Offshore is the relationship between Nenna and Edward, really the novel is a loosely gathered-together series of very funny, sometimes sad, often warm-hearted set pieces about life on a houseboat, an experience Fitzgerald knew intimately (having lived on the Thames in the early 60s).² It’s the sort of novel that derives a sense of joy and pleasure from spending several pages following Martha and Tilda mudlarking on the Thames foreshore (where they find and sell two William de Morgan tiles). But what’s really remarkable is how Fitzgerald, in a novel this short (it’s almost a novella), brings life to even the most peripheral characters.

I don’t know if Offshore should have won the Booker. But the couple of hours I spent with it were bliss.

1. If you don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, you must be new here. Welcome. Now check out my review of P. H. Newby’s Something To Answer For. All will be explained.

2. Terrifyingly, her boat sank twice!