Booker Winners 1973-1983: Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

As part of my self-imposed Read the Booker Winners for the First Decade of My Life project, I have just now finished the audiobook of the short but sweet novel that won in 1979 - Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore. Summary: I liked it very much, and rate it 8.5/10. 

Given that The Sea, The Sea also scored an 8.5 from me recently, and the two I had previously read (Midnight's Children and Schindler's Ark) are both easy 9s, so far, the decade of my birth is coming up trumps! I'm starting the Coetzee audiobook next, and reading the Gordimer as a library e-book because I couldn't find an audio version anywhere, so we shall see if this positive run holds.

This is, simply put, a lovely little book. Quirky (but not in a bad, shallow way), frequently wryly funny, and very moving, it is the entwined stories of a collection of houseboat-dwellers living at Battersea Wharf in 1961, people with, literally (to misquote Shakespeare), one foot in water, one on shore.

The characters are a vivid, appealing cast of weirdoes (or, at least, people who are displaced from the mainstream in some way). The action centres around Nenna James, a woman in her early 30s, living on the houseboat Grace with her two daughters, Martha (12) and Tilda (6). 

Nenna becomes the focus through which the stories of several other river denizens are explored. This includes Richard, the self-appointed "dad" of the wharf (summed up perfectly in this quote - “Richard was the kind of man who has two clean handkerchiefs on him at half past three in the morning.”); Maurice, the sex worker who lives in the next boat along and becomes Nenna's confidante as she tries to rebuild her failing marriage to her daughters' father; Willis, an elderly marine painter who takes the artistically-inclined Tilda under his wing; and Woodie (and near the end of the book, "Mrs Woodie" as well, as she comes to help him winterize the boat), a retired businessman who lives summers on his boat but winters with his wife onshore. 

In addition to the boat-dwellers, other characters come and go, all beautifully sketched with an economy of carefully-placed words: Nenna's Canadian sister and brother in law; her estranged husband; Harry, the quite nasty criminal using Maurice's boat as storage for stolen goods; Heinrich, the teenage German son of friends that comes for a visit and spends a sweet day with Martha, becoming her first crush.

The overall feel of the book is gentle, although there are certainly problems to be addressed and crises to be faced. Although Fitzgerald's motley crew are all off-centre in some way, she digs into the idea that, for them, the river may be giving them something they need, whether that is temporary or not. The language, the action, the relationships between characters, ebb and flow, in a state of tidal flux, perfectly capturing and reflecting their environment. 

As one character remarks, “There isn’t one kind of happiness, there’s all kinds.” And although their community is fractured in the end, in amidst the leaky boats and troubles of life, there is a happiness, a satisfaction, a real community of trust, in this splinter of time, for those who live offshore. A really delightful read.

Target list:

• J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)
• Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist (1974* tie)
• Stanley Middleton, Holiday (1974* tie)
• Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust (1975)
• David Storey, Saville (1976)
• Paul Scott, Staying On (1977)
• ✅Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea (1978)
• ✅Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore (1979)
• William Golding, Rites of Passage (1980)
• ✅Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (1981)
• ✅Thomas Keneally, Schindler's Ark (1982)
• J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (1983)