I don’t know how I missed this book as a teenager, I would have loved it. Since then, I have lived in London and married a bloke with a boat on the Thames, not one we lived on full time, as the people do in this book, but an old 45 ft pilot launch from Scotland that we would motor from Chiswick Quay Marina to Kew and Richmond. Getting up to Isleworth we’d moor up for the weekend and wait for the water to drop so we could check the boat’s bottom before getting tanked at the London Apprentice. Trips down to Battersea were always a bit more dodgy with the racing tides and looming, very solid bridges. The Battersea Reach is where this book is set and the characters full time boat dwellers, which makes them a breed of their own.
It’s a romantic idea, to grow up on a riverboat, though one that’s permanently moored in a densely urban area on the cold and dirty Thames (this is set in the 60s) doesn’t have much appeal. There is ‘freedom’ from conventional living: no shower, no loo, no appliances. The trade-offs offered by Penelope Fitzgerald here are the tight community, the affordability for a solo mum, and installing that great British trait into your kids: how to make do.
There is not a lot of plot in Offshore, this is more a study of the relationships between the eccentric characters in the boat community. There is a hierarchy among the boats and their owners, from the flashiest Lord Jim owned by Richard and Laura, through sweet Maurice the prostitute’s boat which is use to store stolen goods, to old Willis on the dilapidated and sinking Dreadnought. Our main focus is on Nenna, a bohemian Canadian who has left her English husband and thinks she might want him back. She lives on a barge called Grace with her young daughters, Tilda and Martha, who avoid school with the nuns but go mudlarking and have a good sense of the world. Tilda “cared nothing for the future, and had, as a result, a great capacity for happiness”.
The kids run lightly across wobbly boards chasing the cat from boat to boat and boat to shore while their mum checks on leaks and electrical problems. Like I say, lots of atmosphere but not a lot of plot.
There is, however, a lot of evocative writing, plenty of classic Fitzgerald introspection, plenty of whimsy. She was still at the RSM then, violin first study, and she fell in love as only a violinist can. When Nenna goes to seek out her estranged husband there is a storm which brings all the problems of boat dwelling (and this fragile solo-parenthood lifestyle) raging up the Thames on a tidal surge and wrecks their precarious perches on life.
Offshore was the surprise winner of the Booker Prize in 1979. As the critics point out, it is not a book for everyone. But for those who love evocative detail and an exploration of gentle characters and find themselves in need of a slow mood far away from psycho killers and thrills, this is perfect.
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