 First edition | |
| Author | Penelope Fitzgerald |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | George Murray |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Publisher | Collins[1] |
Publication date | 1979 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Pages | 141[1] |
| ISBN | 0-395-47804-9 |
| OCLC | 38043106 |
Offshore is a 1979 novel byPenelope Fitzgerald. Her third novel, it won theBooker Prize in the same year. The book explores the emotional restlessness of houseboat dwellers who live neither fully on the water nor fully on the land. It was inspired by the most difficult years of Fitzgerald's own life, years during which she lived on an oldThames sailing barge moored at Battersea Reach.
Set in 1961, the novel follows an eccentric community of houseboat owners whose permanently moored craft cluster together along the insalubrious bank of theRiver Thames at Battersea Reach,London.
Nenna, living aboardGrace with her two children Martha and Tilda, is obsessed with thoughts of her estranged husband Edward returning to her, while her children run wild on the muddy foreshore. Maurice, who lives next to her on a barge he has namedMaurice, provides a sympathetic ear for her worries. He ekes out a precarious living as a male prostitute, bringing back men most evenings from the nearby pub, and allowing his boat to be used for the storage of stolen goods by his shadowy acquaintance, Harry. Willis, an elderly marine painter, lives aboardDreadnought which he hopes to sell in spite of its serious leak. Woodie is a retired businessman living aboardRochester during the summer and with his wife Janet inPurley during the winter. Richard, aboard his convertedminesweeperLord Jim, is looked up to as the unofficial leader of the community, both by temperament and by virtue of his past role with theRoyal Naval Volunteer Reserve. His wife Laura hankers to move to a permanent house ashore.
WhenDreadnought unexpectedly sinks, Willis is taken in by Woodie onRochester. Nenna resists the entreaties of her prosperous and energetic sister, who tries to persuade her to move to Canada for the sake of her daughters, and she resolves to confront Edward in his rented room inStoke Newington, north London. Failing to persuade him to return, she gets back toGrace late at night feeling desolate, and bumps into Richard who tells her that his wife has just left him. They spend the night together.
Richard discovers Harry acting suspiciously onMaurice. Harry attacks him, and Richard ends up in hospital. Laura takes her husband's incapacity as the excuse she needs to sellLord Jim and to move herself and Richard into a proper house.
Maurice sits out an overnight storm in his cabin, drinking whisky in the dark. He hears blundering footsteps overhead and discovers that Edward (whom he does not know) has returned, incapably drunk, trying to find Nenna. The storm has blown away the gangplank betweenMaurice andGrace and, almost delirious with drink, the two men climb downMaurice's fixed ladder, intending somehow to cross the wild water between the two boats. As they cling to the ladder,Maurice's anchor is wrenched from the mud, its mooring ropes part, and the boat puts out on the tide.
The novel'sepigraph, "che mena il vento, e che batte la pioggia, e che s'incontran con si aspre lingue" ("whom the wind drives, and whom the rain beats, and those who clash with such bitter tongues") comes from Canto XI ofDante'sInferno.
The book was inspired by the most difficult years of Fitzgerald's own life, years that she had spent living on an old Thames sailing barge namedGrace on Battersea Reach. She later regretted that some translations of the novel's title suggested "far from the shore" when she was in fact writing about boats that were anchored just a few yards from the bank, and the "emotional restlessness of my characters, halfway between the need for security and the doubtful attraction of danger".[2]
The novel was reviewed inThe New York Times Book Review,[3]The Independent[4] andThe Guardian.[5]
In hisUnderstanding Penelope Fitzgerald (2004), Peter Wolfe characterised the novel as "a pocket epic, packing into 141 pages the piecemeal dissolution of a way of life".[6] He considered the work to be that of a master[7] – more darkly expansive than Fitzgerald's first two novels while displaying the same tightness and precision.[6] The author employs, he said, a sensual descriptive style with closely interlocked narrative, and her uncanny gift for describing the commonplace and overlooked galvanises the flow.[8]
In a 2013 introduction,Alan Hollinghurst noted thatOffshore was the novel in which Fitzgerald found her form – her technique and her power. He noted that the group portrait of the boat owners within the novel is constantly developing, change and flux being the essence of the book, with the author moving between the strands of the story with insouciant wit and ease.[2]
Offshore won theBooker Prize in 1979.[9] At 132 pages first-edition, the novel is also the shortest yet to win the prize.[10]Hilary Spurling, one of the judges, later said that the panel was unable to decide betweenA Bend in the River andDarkness Visible, settling onOffshore as a compromise.[11] The book's surprise win was greeted with a reaction that Fitzgerald's publisher described as "so unpleasant a demonstration of naked spite".[12]