Offshore

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There was nothing experimental about the writing yet I experienced it initially as if there had been, as if the narrative had been spliced up into separate chunks with no connecting ropes between them. As a first-time reader, I must admit to feeling lost about the fuss, even with the benefit of a glowing new introduction by fellow Booker alumni Alan Hollinghurst.

It “would have meant that he had failed in life, whereas, really, his kindness made him the very symbol of success in my eyes.I can only assume Nenna and Richard feel a stronger inexplicable affinity with the watery element than I.

On Battersea Reach, a mixed bag of the temporarily lost and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the tide of the Thames. Fitzgerald’s teetering outcasts find it impossible despite their best efforts; they're constantly making half-assed plans to rejoin society, but they've ended up here for a reason. It’s a fairly sparse novel populated by a group of fairly run down eccentrics and despite its brevity moves at a gentle pace. For a while I thought I was going to be disappointed by the ending, though it seems to have worked out reasonably well - however Offshore does suffer a little from the idea that it's more 'literary' to have a partly inconclusive ending.Richard invites Nenna for a romantic night-time trip in his dinghy in his characteristic way: '“We could go up under Wandsworth Bridge as far as the Fina Oil Depot and then switch off and drift down with the tide”' Without any discussion they spend the night together. Page after page, this is a miraculous book, miraculous in its genial understanding of character, doubly miraculous in its powers of description. She really wants to get together with Edward, who, after spending 18 months in South America supposedly to save up, comes back to find Nenna and the children aboard Grace and freaks out. Some of the people appear rather normal to high functioning in this 1960s world (Richard) while others appear to be near drowning as they try to find a way to survive (Nenna, Maurice, Willis) while Nenna's daughters Tilda and Martha are caught somewhere in between. I was wondering if this was some deliberate alienation device or if you just had some kind of major brain fade when you wrote this, and no one, agents, editors, reviewers, nobody noticed.

But the future is not entirely closed off, as there is an implication that Richard will seek Nenna out in Canada next year. Stephanie Racine, the advisory editor, narrates a very short preface written by biographer Hermione Lee, she being the author of Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. Your novel is set in 1962, there are dates and ages of characters provided to establish that, plus Martha the 12 year old girl loves Elvis and Cliff Richard.At the beginning of an outing in a dinghy with Richard, Nenna thinks “…reality seemed to have lost its accustomed hold, just as the day wavered uncertainly between night and morning. In a 2013 introduction, Alan Hollinghurst noted that Offshore was the novel in which Fitzgerald found her form – her technique and her power. This quirky bit of humour along with some much more subtle, wry examples soon had me hooked along with the author’s gift for conveying implicitly a great deal about her characters’ situations and personalities.