Offshore

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She also lived on a houseboat in Battersea, on a barge floating on the Thames, on a barge that sunk not once but twice. A mile and a half down Green Lanes, half a mile down Nassington (sic) Green Road, one and a half miles the wrong way down Balls Pond Road, two miles down Kingsland Road, and then she was lost”. I have always been drawn to water, and even lived at sea for a while (I was not happy for other reasons, but I was happy to be at sea) But, hopelessly addicted to warmth and cleanliness, knowing the filthy Thames, the muggy, tepid London weather at its most unpleasantly moist, I must imagine being utterly miserable on a river barge once the novelty wore off. Those experiences--including the sinking of their boat--served as the inspiration for Offshore: A Novel, a short spare novel that won the Booker Prize in 1979.

Offshore, the 1997 Booker Prize winner, is set in the 60's, the perfect time period for these water dwellers who are quietly defying conventional life off the shore of the hip area of Chelsea.For who else would get so much into just 181 pages, making it the ideal companion to a trip where every gramme of weight counted since I was carrying the necessary over hill and dale myself? Hermione Lee’s recent biography Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life provides a wealth of background and insight into the book. Offshore has the comforting feeling of "a children's book for adults", set in the romantic but grubby world of Thames houseboats, in which everyone is escaping in one way or another from conventional lifestyle, and has "the curious acquired characteristics of the river dwellers, which made them scarcely at home in London’s streets". Why shouldn't this neat little book, where no episode, no character and no character's thoughts take up much room, make for a perfectly acceptable narrative, as economical in its own way as the inside of a barge dweller's home? With this and other questions waiting to be answered, Offshore offers a delightful glimpse of the workings of an eccentric community.

To decide or not, for ”when you decide, you multiply the things you might have done and now never can. In a 2013 introduction, Alan Hollinghurst noted that Offshore was the novel in which Fitzgerald found her form – her technique and her power. But if I was rating it on the interesting plot, the fascinating characters I wanted to know more about, the unusual setting of houseboats on the Thames or just sheer enjoyment of passing a few hours in another world, I would have given it 1 star which equals boring book about people (apart from the children, I liked them, wild little things that they were) I couldn't care less about. In his Understanding Penelope Fitzgerald (2004), Peter Wolfe characterised the novel as "a pocket epic, packing into 141 pages the piecemeal dissolution of a way of life". I am a quote marker, and I found that I had read this book and marked only two passages, and neither of them was striking.Seeing him distressed, she says '“I wish I knew the exact time”', which is a cue for Richard to show off his chronometers.