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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 --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Graceful & Elegant Look at the Importance of Friendship,
By
This review is from: Offshore (Paperback)
Here is a short, but wonderfully tight and thoughtful story about a motley group of characters living on houseboats along Battersea Reach on London's Thames. One follows the various moods of the river and it's inhabitants, both of which are picturesque indeed.In the end, it is the importance of friendship and companionship that stick. Very much worth the short read.
5.0 out of 5 stars
In precarious existence,
By A Customer
This review is from: Offshore (Paperback)
Describing the quietly desperate - if not demented - lives of people clinging to the shores of the Thames in London - struggling to extend their existence in some form of order - was perfect staging for Ms. Fitzgerald. She reveled in the development of characters which did not fit, did not conform, never really understood their society or their surroundings. These characters living Offshore have not so much banded together as they have fled to the same (unsafe) haven from the demands of society around them. There is no plot - there are just the wonderfully developed characters and their idiosyncratic deeds and mis-deeds. This odd assortment of dwellers on the edge of the river - and the outer fringes of life - are the base from which Ms. Fitzgerald compels the reader to reflect on their own precarious existence. The final scene - literally heading Offshore - is priceless. Certainly one of the great short novels of recent memory, recommended to all who read to admire the craft of a literary artist in the perfect element.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Vividly gratifying and incisive book that never drains away.,
By
This review is from: Offshore (Paperback)
Engossingly sagacious in observance and unremitting in economical prose, Offshore is a sententious written work of art that owes its eloquence to its timeless and picturesque narration as well as its breakneck character development. Like Hemmingway, the late Penelope Fitzgerald carefully chose her diction, framed it beautifully and perspicuously articulated it. Rest assured, readers, there is no verbiage or cluttered wording in this book; each word, sentence, has a clearly defined purpose. Her phraseology is literary without being rhetorical, candid without being laconic and attractive so as not to be excessively slavish. If the totality of the novel is written in a too secure fashion, it is not surprising that the story takes place on the Battersea with a group of somewhat lost, Bohemian, barge-dwelling souls. The fragmented lives of the characters and the manner in which they choose to live is anything but rigid. The characters are neither land-dwellers nor sea-dwellers; they are in between - the middle - fluctuating like their barges in utter confusion or utter certainty. For them, however, they are in certain confusion. That is the one thing they are sure of, so it is probably appropriate that they live where they do, in a sense: a no-man's land. The rigorous and hard-edged juxtapositional phrasing is almost like the character mentality: grim, intense, uncertain, twisting, sometimes amorphous. Applying these emotions to the human perception of daily life makes these characters almost depressing and pathetic to want to comprehend. But they are real and genuine emotions. That is the pith of this work. The repetitive mental grayness that thrusts the story forth is rather weary in it hardships, and its subtle dry wit is almost unrecognizable if one is not looking - in vain - for it. The abruptness of the novel's ending may seem unsatisfactory, but it is appropriate: "The hatch in front of them flew open and the frame, tilted from one side to the other, gave them a sight of the wild sky outside...As the battering wind seized them they had to stoop along in the darkness, fighting for handholds, first the base of the old pulley, then the mast. Three toasters sailed away like spindrift in the gale still blowing hard north-west." (P.139-140) The minds of some of these characters appears to be in prevalent disarray. In a state like that sometimes the best way to get out of it is with the help of the people we have around us, like in this barge-dwelling community. To surmount the oncoming gale, Nenna, Maurice, Edward and the lot are not only dependent on themselves, but on the able efforts of each other: a community of willing friends. To stumble off the golden path of destiny and wind up in a realm of havoc and haze is a hard truth of what life can offer. But it is an easy thing to accept depending on the people around you. This is a book imbued with world wisdom and hard falls.
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