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Offshore, Human Voices, the Beginning of Spring, by Penelope Fitzgerald
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Sixty-one when she published her first novel, Penelope Fitzgerald based many subsequent books on the experiences of a long and varied life. Offshore, which won the Booker Prize in 1979, explores her time living on a barge at Battersea Reach. Human Voices takes place in the BBC where she worked during World War II. Both are vivid, intimate pictures of ordinary life, startling, sad and funny by turns, conjuring up complex worlds with the economy of poetry. The Beginning of Spring is an historical novel operating on a larger canvas. It presents a life unknown to the author through a story of English emigres in pre-Revolutionary Russia and has been described by one critic as the best 'Russian' novel of the twentieth century. Written with energy, passion and wit, and each quite different from the others, all three of these masterpieces reveal a lightness of touch with the most serious matters unlike anything else in contemporary fiction.
- Sales Rank: #2115280 in Books
- Published on: 2003-09-04
- Format: International Edition
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.27" h x 1.18" w x 5.31" l, 1.16 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 512 pages
Amazon.com Review
Offshore possesses perfect, very odd pitch. In just over 130 pages of the wittiest and most melancholy prose, Penelope Fitzgerald limns the lives of "creatures neither of firm land nor water"--a group of barge-dwellers in London's Battersea Reach, circa 1961. One man, a marine artist whose commissions have dropped off since the war, is attempting to sell his decrepit craft before it sinks. Another, a dutiful businessman with a bored, mutinous wife, knows he should be landlocked but remains drawn to the muddy Thames. A third, Maurice, a male prostitute, doesn't even protest when a criminal acquaintance begins to use his barge as a depot for stolen goods: "The dangerous and the ridiculous were necessary to his life, otherwise tenderness would overwhelm him."
At the center of the novel--winner of the 1979 Booker Prize--are Nenna and her truant six- and 11-year-old daughters. The younger sibling "cared nothing for the future, and had, as a result, a great capacity for happiness." But the older girl is considerably less blithe. "Small and thin, with dark eyes which already showed an acceptance of the world's shortcomings," Fitzgerald writes, she "was not like her mother and even less like her father. The crucial moment when children realise that their parents are younger than they are had long since been passed by Martha."
Their father is farther afield. Unable to bear the prospect of living on the Grace, he's staying in Stoke Newington, part of London but a lost world to his wife and daughters. Meanwhile, Nenna spends her time going over incidents that seem to have led to her current situation, and the matter of some missing squash racquets becomes of increasing import. Though she is peaceful by nature, experience and poverty are wearing Nenna down. Her confidante Maurice, after a momentary spell of optimism, also returns to his life of little expectation and quiet acceptance: "Tenderly responsive to the self-deceptions of others, he was unfortunately too well able to understand his own."
Penelope Fitzgerald views her creations with deep but wry compassion. Having lived on a barge herself, she offers her expert spin on the dangers, graces, and whimsies of river life. Nenna, too, has become a savant, instantly recognizing on one occasion that the mud encasing the family cat is not from the Reach. This "sagacious brute" is almost as complex as his human counterparts, constantly forced to adjust her notions of vermin and authority. Though Stripey is capable of catching and killing very young rats, the older ones chase her. "The resulting uncertainty as to whether she was coming or going had made her, to some extent, mentally unstable."
As always, Fitzgerald is a master of the initially bizarre juxtaposition. Adjacent sentences often seem like delightful non sequiturs--until they flash together in an effortless evocation of character, era, and human absurdity. Nenna recalls, for instance, how the buds had dropped off the plant her husband rushed to the hospital when Martha was born. She "had never criticized the bloomless azalea. It was the other young mothers in the beds each side of her who had laughed at it. That had been 1951. Two of the new babies in the ward had been christened Festival." Tiny comical epiphanies such as these have caused the author to be dubbed a "British miniaturist." Yet the phrase utterly misses the risks Fitzgerald's novellas take, the discoveries they make, and the endless pleasures they provide. --Kerry Fried
From Publishers Weekly
Housed in once-seaworthy barges on the Thames, half-a-dozen irrepressibly quirky people and their collective rat-fearing cat give each otherand the charmed readeradvice and comfort. Chief among them are Richard, whose boat and person are always shipshape, and Nenna, whose aren't, partly because her husband Edward refuses to live on a boat but mainly because she has reached that vulnerable point in her maternal affairs at which she recognizes the superior capability of her 12-year-old daughter Martha. It is Martha who gets supper on the table and calls Tilda, six, down from the mast, where she sits declaiming passages from courtly tales of kings and queens. For all except Richard, who goes to a proper job at nine o'clock every morning, life is so precarious that old Willis, the marine painter, must sell his decrepit boat (at low tide, when the leaks won't be noticed), and young Maurice, Nenna's best friend, must eke out his living as a male prostitute by receiving stolen goods. In short order, matters take several ironic turns that disrupt the carefree, if scrubby, ease of barge life. Fitzgerald, whose Innocence was published to acclaim here last year, won the Booker Prize in 1979 with this earlier novel. With economical prose and wonderfully vivid dialogue, she fashions a wry, fast-moving story whose ambiguous ending is exactly right, although it leaves readers (and one of the characters) hanging.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Fitzgerald was red hot in 1998. Not only did her most recent work, The Blue Flower, win top fiction honors at the National Book Critics Circle Awards, but several of her older titles were reprinted. Among them was this 1979 Booker Prize winner, which follows a bevy of characters living in houseboats on the Thames. (Classic Returns, LJ 5/1/98)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
On the Margins
By Roger Brunyate
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.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Just about as perfect a story as you're likely to find
By Kerry Walters
Some novelists--Dickens, for example--are fantastic at creating strong characters, but not so much on plot. Others--Victor Hugo immediately comes to mind--write narratives with such intricate and energetic plots that the characters take second seat. Still others--Solzhenitsyn--write novels which want to make serious moral points. All of these are perfectly legitimate styles.
But there are some novelists who simply want to tell good stories by sketching a mood through a series of vignettes and characters that may be tied together only loosely. This is Penelope Fitzgerald's forte, and nowhere does she succeed more obviously than in her fantastic, Booker-winning Offshore.
The novel is reminiscent of a comedy of manners, except for the fact that it's sweet and nostalgic rather than satirical. The characters tend to be types: the noble but rather straight-laced businessman with an adventurous streak he keep tightly tamped down; the lovelorn, tender-hearted, child-loving character--in this case, a gay prostitute; a strong-willed, determined woman with a weak husband and two marvelous children (one of them, Tilda, is the runaway star of the novel); an aged, down-on-his luck artist with a rough edge and a heart of gold. All of these folks inhabit a now lost world, living on barges in one of the Thames reaches, weathering financial troubles, loneliness, and suddenly rising tides. Fitzgerald aims to give us a temporal slice of their lives, a slice that is cut roughly around the edges because the novel ends, as so many of her books do, on a note of ambiguity.
Some dislike this style of story-telling, dismissing it as too sketchy, too thin in plot, too many loose ends. But when you think about it, isn't this pretty much a description of actual life? Individual or group existence is never perfectly orchestrated with Aristotle's beginning, middle, and end. Things are much sloppier, much boggier, than that. The merit of Fitzgerald is that she's able to capture that murkiness without allowing it to become banal.
Six stars.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
lack of good details and descriptions
By Michelle McCarty
There was no character development, lack of good details and descriptions, hard to read.
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