Offshore

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Penelope Fitzgerald was an English novelist, poet, essayist and biographer. In 2008, The Times included her in a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". In 2012, The Observer named her final novel, The Blue Flower, as one of "the ten best historical novels". Hillary Spurling also said the widespread incredulity that greeted this unexpected triumph caused Fitzgerald "pain … and humiliation ever after". The author was probably all too aware that this wasn't the best book on the shortlist – or even her best. It's perhaps also the reason her later, far better historical novels didn't even get a look-in for the prize. Injustice all round. It is set in "the Reach", a small community of barge-dwellers in London, around 1962. The houseboats are permanently moored; their movement is limited to bobbing up and down on the tide. She married Desmond Fitzgerald, an Irish soldier who she met at a wartime party, in 1941; he died in 1976. They had a son and two daughters. In 1996, she was awarded the Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime's achievement in literature. All these old boats leak like sieves. Just as all these period houses are as rotten as old cheese. Everyone knows that. But age has its value.’"

Mastery of sources and a taste for concision might lead you to expect that the narrative line of Fitzgerald's novels would be pre-eminently lucid. Far from it: there is a kind of benign wrong-footingness at work, often from the first line. Here is the start of The Beginning of Spring Milvain Street, Stoke Newington.’ ‘In Christ’s name, who’s ever heard of such a place?’ (Did that already sound comical in the late 70s?) What is striking is the accuracy of her observation, the aesthetically satisfying precision with which, stylistically, the arrow goes straight into the centre of the gold. The economy with which she achieved her effects - "I always feel the reader is very insulted by being told too much," she said - and her ability to combine a microscopic with a panoramic perspective, made most other contemporary novels appear flatulent and over-written. Yet the promise of this scene, I feel, is lost. I am not suggesting from this there had to be a happy ending or a sad ending to make the book better. I thought the book needed an ending that made sense of the situation the characters found themselves in and gave their stories some significance. When I finally saw the movie adaptation of The Book Shop I was disappointed by the ending being changed from the book. The movie was good, but the revised ending robbed the story of the significance of Florence Green’s life and her struggles to keep her shop in the face of Machiavellian forces. But the ending of Offshore seems random and chaotic and the novel’s parts poorly resolved.In a conversation between a sixth-form age boy and an eleven-year-old developing a crush on him (the one part of the book which would be frowned on today), Fitzgerald's 1995 historical novel The Blue Flower is prefigured: "you are like the blonde mistress of Heine, the poet Heine, wenig Fleisch, sehr viel Gemüt, little body, but so much spirit’. He leaned forward and kissed her cheek" This affectionately humorous tone is predominant throughout the novel. The author maintains an amused distance from her characters, but is clearly on their side. It vividly conjures the vicissitudes of the sights and sounds of the water and weather, aided by a splattering of boaty jargon. The main characters are Nenna (only 32, but with daughters Martha, 12, and Tilda, 6); Maurice, a young gay man making ends meet as a prostitute; Willis, an old marine painter, whose boat is in need of sprucing up; boat-proud Woodrow (Woodie); and Richard, a natural leader, ex-navy, now working in insurance, with the biggest, smartest boat.

Lee stays close to the evidence, and is wary of speculation. But it’s hard not to see the story of Fitzgerald’s life—at least, until its improbable late renaissance—as painfully symptomatic of its period and nation, a self half-maimed by familial emotional reticence, unhappy boarding schools (Fitzgerald was sent away at the age of eight, and hated her schools), male privilege, the religious self-mortification of leftover Victorian evangelicalism, the devastations of two world wars, and a distinctively English postwar parsimoniousness. Besides Nenna, the novel is peopled with a rogues’ gallery of failures, individuals attempting to ride out the time remaining to them in some semblance of productivity and usefulness. There is, for instance, Maurice, a gentle neighbor who survives on the subsistence wages he makes as a male prostitute; Willis, a bedraggled old maritime painter who’s seen the demand for his works decline steadily since the war’s end; and Richard, the vaguely patrician, de facto leader of the Reach-dwellers, who once served as a volunteer in the Royal Navy and whose wife has grown increasingly fed up with his interest in house boats. There can be few better examples of her skill than the way in which the focus gradually transfers in the second half of the book from Fritz to his 14-year-old fiancée Sophie, a brash, uninteresting teenager, who is dying of TB. This is a shift in perception, which is not just a fictional device but also a subtle moral judgment. Her work was very much in the tradition of European story-telling, Italo Calvino being a particularly close analogy. I would avoid The Bookshop, which was my first Fitzgerald, and which I thought light and of little substance. That’s doubtless unfair, but I do think it’s more of a ‘straight’ novel (or more grounded, as tolsmted says) than her other work, and less interesting as a consequence.The process of gentrifying London takes place on the river as well as on land. The majority of boats today are almost floating houses built up on steel hulls. There was never a minesweeper, but there was a torpedo boat, which has long gone from Chelsea but is apparently still intact and being made seaworthy again.

The boats are still there along Cheyne Walk, and larger and more numerous (and more colourful) than they were in the 1960’s. Even then there was a more fashionable element among the boat-owners than Fitzgerald describes.

Nenna’s thoughts, whenever she was alone, took the form of a kind of perpetual magistrate’s hearing, in which her own version of her marriage was shown as ridiculously simple and demonstrably right, and then, almost exactly at the same time, as incontrovertibly wrong. Her conscience, too, held, quite uninvited, a separate watching brief, and intervened in the proceedings to read statements of an unwelcome nature. The waiter invited them to choose between coq au vin and navarin of lamb, either of which, in other circumstances, would have been called stew." Grace. The Blakes -competent Richard and disgruntled Laura - live on the well-maintained Lord Jim. Willis, an aging marine painter, lives alone on the leaky Dreadnought. Kind but corrupted Maurice lives, conveniently, on Maurice. The setting is not exactly like the real-life location: for example, in the book the landmark Chelsea Flour Mills has been replaced by a non-existent brewery, and nobody ever mentions the enchanting sight of Albert Bridge lit up at night. The idea, she later said, “first came to me from a friend of mine who was Swiss but had been brought up in Russia… they had a greenhouse and stayed in Moscow all through the first world war, the Bolshevik revolution, arrival of Lenin… and all this time [were] allowed fuel (coal, wood, birch bark, newspaper) because Russian officials have [a] passion for flowers”. What appealed to Fitzgerald was “a sort of noble absurdity in carrying on in unlikely circumstances”.