Customer Reviews

Offshore

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

Well written novels are often a chore to read; many authors seem determined to prove that they can write, and produce mounds of lovely prose which has to be shoveled aside like so much heavy snow to get purchase on the story underneath. Not so with Penelope Fitzgerald. "Offshore" is a masterpiece of brevity. The quirky tale of a collection of misfits living on houseboats in 60's London, the book is something of a literary sketchbook, each character drawn with a few deft strokes. There is Willis, for example: "[H]is moral standards were much the same as Richard's; only he did not feel he was well enough off to apply them as often, and in such a wide range of conditions..." Then there is Tilda: "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." All of this is a delight to read. My only complaint is the somewhat framentary nature of the narrative; all the parts are well made, but they don't make a particularly coherent whole. Definitely a book worth reading, though.

I must start off by saying that the late Penelope Fitzgerald deserved the literary accolades showered upon her. This is the first book that I have read by Fitzgerald and I must admit that it was not what I was expecting. Knowing that this book had won the distinguished Booker Prize, I settled into it with high expectations. I must warn readers that they should not expect a plot-driven novel in Offshore. The strength of Fitzgerald's book is the character development. She has a knack for the subtleties of human emotion and the strong bond that exists among the residents of Battersea. The main theme of the novel is original: this group of outcasts lives somewhere in between land and sea and have formed their own little community. The book has its moments: the characters of Martha and Tildie are particularly intriguing. However, in my opinion, the book is a disappointment. I must admit that I have little patience for a book with so little momentum when the characters do not generally appeal to me. The shortness of the novel may appeal to some readers: personally, I prefer the larger opus that moves the story along. A terrific book in its own right but simply not my cup of tea.

Penelope Fitzgerald, though she did not publish her first novel until she was sixty, had, by the time she died this year, become one of England's most awarded and revered authors. Critics describe her as a miniaturist, by which they apparently mean that her novels are small sketches of particular aspects of life. Offshore, for which she won her first Booker Prize, is a good example of this form. Based in part on her time spent living on a barge in the Thames, the novel tells the story of a brief period in the lives of a group of eccentrics who live aboard ship in Battersea Reach on the Thames. Actually, it only barely tells a story, it is more an exercise in establishing characters and a setting than anything else.

In order for this to work, you either have to have fascinating characters or a spellbinding setting, she has neither. At first, as you're reading, she seems about to update Our Mutual Friend, with it's central theme of people, on the margins of society, living on and off of London's great waterway. But where Dickens creates unforgettable characters and plops them down in a labyrinthine plot, these characters are only mildly amusing and there's virtually no plot. The other author who sprang to mind is Joseph Mitchell, the great New Yorker essayist whose works are collected in Up In The Old Hotel. He was a master at crafting portraits that were small masterpieces around the bums and lunatics of New York City, but there are no Joe Goulds in Offshore.

This is a quick enough read (my copy is just 141 pages) and there's a periodic chuckle, but I found it difficult to care about the characters and am mystified by the book's reputation. One of the obituaries below refers to Ms Fitzgerald's "remarkable sensitivities." I am perfectly willing to concede that I am a man of severely limited sensitivities and so the fault for my not enjoying the book may well lie with me.

GRADE: C-

Fitzgerald's cast of characters in this Booker Prize novella are a motley group of people living in converted barges and small craft moored by the banks of the Thames, rising with the tide then sinking back into the mud. Their self-appointed chairman is a super-shipshape ex-Naval officer living on a converted minesweeper. At the other end of the scale are an aging artist and a gregarious male prostitute. Quite different from one another, they are nonetheless linked by a common suspicion of land-bound life, and by their willingness to share each other's problems. The central character, Nenna James, still longing for her absent husband, is the single mother of two precocious girls, who gain a richer education at the water's edge than in their occasional visits to school, where the nuns pray regularly for their father's return.

Page after page, this is a miraculous book, miraculous in its genial understanding of character, doubly miraculous in its powers of description. For example, the effect of the rising tide: "On every barge on the Reach a very faint ominous tap, no louder than the door of a cupboard shutting, would be followed by louder ones from every strake, timber and weatherboard, a fusillade of thunderous creaking, and even groans that seemed human. The crazy old vessels, riding high in the water without cargo, awaited their owners' return." Or the description of Stripey, the James children's mud-encrusted cat: "The ship's cat was in every way appropriate to the Reach. She habitually moved in a kind of nautical crawl, with her stomach close to the deck, as though close-furled and ready for dirty weather."

For a while, the closed community of oddball characters seems almost a set-up for an Agatha Christie mystery, and Fitzgerald's first novel, THE GOLDEN CHILD, was indeed a mystery. But her remaining eight books -- all short, all astonishingly different -- take a more subtle tack. Whether based on her own life (including OFFSHORE and her other Booker nomination, THE BOOKSHOP) or set in distant times and places (pre-Revolutionary Moscow in THE BEGINNING OF SPRING, Goethe's Germany in THE BLUE FLOWER), they all share a sense of slightly sad comedy. So it is with OFFSHORE. Miracle-worker though she is, Fitzgerald eschews the easy miracle of a neatly sewn-up ending. The reader is left to imagine a consequence in which each of these lives moves forward into a new phase, perhaps happy, perhaps less so. But the close community of the opening has broken up. Writing in 1979, Fitzgerald sets the book in 1962, during the brief flowering of "swinging London," after which everything would change. Though no more than a faint background presence, she is extraordinarily sensitive to the pathos of impermanence. And she paints these lives lived on the margins of the tides with both a smile and a tear for their inherent unstability.

It's difficult to summarize the appeal of Offshore, but unique as it is, it's the real thing: every sentence, every word counts; it has a gorgeous story (the breakup of a community, poignant and full of ironies); and people who are utterly real in their inconsistencies, their impulses, their irrational needs. You hardly realize as you're reading how perfect the thing is; that comes later, on reflection.

Penelope Fitzgerald's work is not about length. It's about depth. Her mastry lies in her ability to be as nuanced and profound as she in such few words. I think this is her best book.

I read Offshore in my pursuit of reading all the Booker winners. I was initially intrigued by the premise of getting a view into a community of offbeat characters living on boats in London's Battersea Reach in the early 60's. I was expecting kind of a Bohemian group, but actually the characters are fairly conventional. While the prose is decent, I was never driven to keep reading by character, plot, or theme. It's quite short, so I did finish it, but so little happened in those pages, I would not recommend this book to anyone. I finished the work wondering, "why was this so special? Did I miss something, or was it such a work of the moment that now it has faded?"

Having chosen this for a bookclub I was dissapointed when I finished the book. The story seemed to go nowhere, the characters not that interesting and like others have written I was left wondering... I am so used to having the whole story completely given to me - in great detail. This is not Penelope Fitzgeralds style, barebones is a better description. But...I must say the discussion we had bought the book alive for me. The author gives us such little detail we spoke at length about our individual reflections on each characters motives and their 'roles' within the micro barge community. Did Nenna in the end assert herself as a women or allow her life to be controlled by her sister as in a way she had allowed her daughter to be the parent on their barge? Why was she propositioned on the way home from meeting her husband, why didn't she go back for her handbag. Was the owner of the Lord Jim attracted to her weaknesses (so unlike his wife) or something else. A lively discussion took place as we each cast our own perceptions upon the ending. Those who are interested in taking a deeper look I think would enjoy this novel.