Review Summaries

• Within its compact structure, the novel makes the community's temperature shifts and discomfort feel vivid. Its restrained style leaves a strong aftertaste.

Reviews

• Livre

  Livraison rapide. Qualite OK

• Ashendon Book Group says...

  This book follows the lives of a group of people living on house boats (redundant Dutch Barges) on the Thames at Battersea Reach. There is no real plot - it is more of a snapshot of a point in time of the characters' lives ("Chekovian" says Sue Roberts). Penelope Fitzgerald uses her words VERY carefully and with great economy and with great success. This is a book to read a second time in order to appreciate the subtlety and depth within it. The more we discussed the book the more we found to talk about and just couldn't stop ourselves digging out quotes and lines. Somehow in such a short book there is so much detail - though no colour. The book is a testament to the 1960's - women who can't fold maps, order a drink in a pub, draw corks, fold the times, hammer nails in or strike matches toward themselves. And single parent families are not the norm - they are socially shocking. Would we recommend it? It's not a happy book, it's quite depressing, it's grey, the humour is deepest dark, it's left to you to decide about the people; it's interesting, it's crammed full of great reading. YES almost without exception we agreed that of course we would recommend it.

• On the Margins

  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.

• Lovely

  An amazing story of life on the Thames with a motley bunch without a purpose

• Excellent writing about real people

  What I like about Penelope Fitzgerald's writing is the accessibility and how she develops her characters. I also like that she writes about real life, not some shined up and polished view of what might have been. But that is also why I docked the book one star, sometimes you want a book that ends in such a way that you feel good about where the characters have arrived. This is the second book I've read by Fitzgerald, the first was The Bookshop, and both books are about real life with all its ambiguity, helpful people, bitter people, and chance meetings that happen and don't happen. I will continue to search out other books by Fitzgerald.

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