Penelope Fitzgerald Offshore (1979)

Having lived in London for a while now, I have learnt that the city changes all the time.  Parts that would once have been working or industrial areas are colonised by the edgy and the fashionable and, eventually, become gentrified to the extent that their previous existence is scarcely more than a memory.  To walk around Battersea now would give very little indication of its industrial or maritime past.  Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore peers into this not too distant history and focuses on a point in time during the swinging Sixties when this part of London was rapidly changing.

The novel is a tale about a group of neighbours who live on old Thames barges at Battersea Reach.  It is set in 1961, a time when the character of Battersea was beginning to change.  Published in 1979, the locality described in Offshore was already a historical memory; Battersea had moved on.  There is definitely a sense of wistfulness about Fitzgerald’s prose, portraying a setting that even the residents know is rapidly dissolving around them.  The mariners are clinging on to this older way of life, in the same way that all of them can be said to be clinging on to memories of a past that held more promise than their lives reveal to them now.  Richard keeps his vessel ship-shape while seemingly avoiding the fact that his marriage is on the rocks; Nenna pretends that her errant husband will return to her; Willis continues to paint watercolours, while the number of clients that appreciate his old-fashioned seascapes dwindles.  Fitzgerald says of them all that they “would have liked to be more respectable than they were… But a certain failure, distressing to themselves, to be like other people, caused them to sink back, with so much else that drifted or was washed up, into the mud moorings of the great tideway”.  This sense of failure and disappointment pervades Offshore, marooning its characters on a desert island of their own regrets.

The novel weighs in at a relatively short 181 pages, but provides a fascinating vignette of the lives of a disparate group of unhappy individuals, all united by their lives between earth and water.  However, I didn’t feel strongly for the characters and the spare style of the prose doesn’t really allow the reader to get close; the brevity also left me feeling as though I was just beginning to understand the characters, only for the end to come much too quickly.  In my opinion it’s not a vintage Booker winner, but it’s an enjoyable read nonetheless.