Offshore

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It did seem just like that, and Martha’s hard bargaining with the owner, who tries to cheat the children but is no match for Martha’s detailed knowledge of the de Morgan pottery, is quite plausible. Lots Road Power Station was decommissioned in 2002 and is now the centrepiece of a 'buzzing new urban lifestyle destination'. The conversation continues with Richard confessing that he can't see the point of so much talk, and bluntly admits he finds it difficult to define or discuss His Feelings! At first, “Offshore” seems like a farcical soap opera involving an eccentric little community of barge-dwellers on the Thames near Blackheath Bridge in the early 1960s. I do however find it fascinating each year when the Booker long list and short list are announced - what has made it on, how are these things chosen?

Even the girls have male preoccupations (Elvis, for example) yet, Fitzgerald finally refuses to let men dominate. Perhaps I had that in common with the motley crew who live in the barges and boats on the Battersea Reach. She is passionate about Edward, her drifting husband, who does not want to live with her; but succumbs to a one-night stand with Richard whom she considers, may be the perfect man - he knows how to fold maps - effortlessly. I compared that with the Elizabeth Taylor novel I had just read, in which I had marked passages on every few pages and had quotes of stunning elegance and wisdom to revisit when I had finished.

He ekes out a precarious living as a male prostitute, bringing back men most evenings from the nearby pub, and allowing his boat to be used for the storage of stolen goods by his shadowy acquaintance, Harry. Willis is a part of the riverside, 'born in Silvertown, within sound of the old boatbuilders’ yards', a brief resume of his past brings in some of the Thames beyond Battersea and Chelsea Reaches. The author employs, he said, a sensual descriptive style with closely interlocked narrative, and her uncanny gift for describing the commonplace and overlooked galvanises the flow.

When Nenna decides to confront Edward to salvage the marriage or to confront him, the way they quarrel and how Nenna speaks to Edward's landlord, and his mother, both of whom Nenna had just met, totally blew me away, and not in a good way.Laura takes her husband's incapacity as the excuse she needs to sell Lord Jim and to move herself and Richard into a proper house.

This is a series of vignettes involving a somewhat close-knit "community" of boat-dwellers and various of their land-living relations/friends/contacts. Through most of the book Nenna tries to decide whether to go and find her husband who has separate lodgings somewhere in Stoke Newington (ah, if only she knew the gentrification 50 years later. The effect is maintained by using correct nautical terms, for example the tide is “making” rather than just coming in. Offshore is a melancholy book about a bunch of misfits living out their miserable existences on houseboats on a stretch of the river Thames.Oh, a gentleman’s county,’ Pinkie replied, wallowing through his barrier of ice, ‘Say Northamptonshire. Do Nenna and the girls go to Canada, and if not, do she and Richard have a chance, or even she and Edward? The story is set in the early 1960s (dates are a little inconsistent) and is a fairly intense evocation of life on the boats. But Martha, small and thin, with dark eyes which already showed an acceptance of the world’s shortcomings, was not like her mother and even less like her father. But if Edward does not want to live on Grace, why doesn't Nenna sell up and go to live with him instead?