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    Offshore
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    Offshore
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    Offshore
    Audiobook5 hours

    Offshore

    Written by Penelope Fitzgerald, Alan Hollinghurst and Stephanie Racine

    Narrated by Alan Hollinghurst and Jot Davies

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE
    FEATURED ON BBC’S BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOK CLUB

    Penelope Fitzgerald’s Booker Prize-winning novel of loneliness and connecting is set among the houseboat community of the Thames, with an introduction from Alan Hollinghurst.

    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.

    There is good-natured Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by chance a receiver of stolen goods. And Richard, an ex-navy man whose boat, much like its owner, dominates the Reach. Then there is Nenna, an abandoned wife and mother of two young girls running wild on the muddy foreshore, whose domestic predicament, as it deepens, will draw this disparate community together.

    Editor's Note

    Between land & sea…

    Fitzgerald has an excellent social eye, deftly exposing those telling details in dialogue that unravel an entire scene or psyche. She depicts her characters — all of whom are suspended in some way — warmly and intricately.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateDec 15, 2016
    ISBN9780008235581
    Unavailable
    Offshore
    Author

    Penelope Fitzgerald

    Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most distinctive voices in British literature. The prize-winning author of nine novels, three biographies and one collection of short stories, she died in 2000.

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    Reviews for Offshore

    3.5/5

    360 ratings28 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Offshore was my second Penelope Fitzgerald novel. I previously read The Bookshop, and am now reading The Blue Flower. I enjoy Fitzgerald's writing style. Her characters are interesting and I admire her ability to define them in a concise way. In Offshore, I found Nenna and her daughters likeable. The whole setting of Offshore (mostly barges on the Thames) was different, but I liked it, and the addition of descriptions of the mainland. I think the themes and characters were varied, and overall, I found the novel to be a great read.
    • 4/5
      This is a beautifully quirky story about a little community of houseboats and barges at Battersea Reach, on the Thames in the early sixties. Fitzgerald has an uncanny ability to weave eccentricities into her characters yet make them completely normal. Their lives fluctuate as much as the tidal river, forever ebbing and flowing, yet we know life on the Reach to be nearing its demise. Fitzgerald does not use an extraneous word in this charming and clever story.
    • 2/5
      I can't say I was impressed by this book. Bewildered maybe, but little more than that. The story centers around Nenna, a separated mother of two girls, who lives on a small house boat on the Thames with her daughters. I wasn't sure she was the main character until over half way through this short novel though, such is the level of noise and confusion with other people in the novel. I suppose in this way the writing mirrors the lives of the assortment of river-dwellers, but I cant help thinking this is accidental rather than intentional on the part of the author. I suppose you could say that the lives of the characters are described as the story unfolds, but not in a way which made me at all interested in them. This had the unfortunate consequence of making a 140 page book seem 540 pages long. There were probably 2 passages that I read again on account of being impressed by the combination of words, but I need way more than that from my Booker Prize winning books, thank you very much.
    • 3/5
      “Biologically they could be said, as most tideline creatures are, to be ‘successful’. They were not easily dislodged. But to sell your craft, to leave the Reach, was felt to be a desperate step, like those of the amphibians when, in earlier stages of the world’s history, they took ground. Many of these species perished in the attempt.”

      Set on a houseboat docked at Battersea Reach on the Thames, Nenna James lives on the Grace with her two daughters. Her estranged husband does not understand her desire to live on a barge, so he has been living apart from the family.

      This is a character-driven novel with little plot. Nenna seems to be trying to organize her life but is not doing a good job of it. She has difficulty making decisions. Her daughters are often left to their own devices. The characters are eccentric. Maurice is storing stolen goods and Richard is an ex-soldier with an unhappy wife. Willis is an aging artist whose boat is sinking.

      The title seems to be a metaphor for the lives of the people living at Battersea Reach. They are adrift and their lives are in disorder. This is a short book that won the Booker Prize in 1979. I liked it, especially the writing, but found the ending rather unsatisfying.
    • 2/5
      Beautifully written, character driven and very atmospheric. But no plot, just a slice of life.

      By the end of the book I didn't care about any of the characters. Their life choices seemed driven by depression or despair or just ennui.

      A winner of the Booker prize, which makes me question how they pick their winners.

    • 3/5
      Well, I read it and quite enjoyed it but I found it dated and a bit stifling. It felt like one of those books that are on the lists but make for unenjoyable reading and if they weren’t on the lists they certainly would not get anywhere near them today. I’m thinking of Lord Jim as being in the same sinking boat.
    • 5/5
      I suspect that Offshore, had it been written today, would be unbearably quirky. A young, newly single mother and her two precocious young daughters live on a disused barge that serves as a houseboat, right on the Thames, along with a cast of colorful, eccentric, very British characters? Eeesh, that sounds awful. Somehow -- perhaps because she more-or-less lived it -- Penelope Fitzgerald's "Offshore" is great. It's a novel about living in that grey area between land and water, sure, but the other thread that I think runs through this book is courage in the face of adaptation: to abandonment, to old age, to the passage of time, and to decisions that can't be undone. Nenna's children, verbose and wise, seem to have adapted completely to their new lives, and think nothing of spending an entire day watching the gulls and boats, while their mother struggles with who she might be outside the context of her failing marriage. It also helps that Fitzgerald can really write. Her prose is fluid, and, considering the subject matter, it feels surprisingly gentle and natural: both her writing and the characters' lives seem to move with the gentle ebb and flow of the river. "Offshore" might also be one of the few books that I've ever read that employs lots of nautical jargon without seeming to go out of its way to confuse or annoy its readers. It describes a waterway that was once vital but has since become a sleepy backwater, a peaceful, nearly forgotten place in the middle of a modern city.In the end, this book's something of an exercise in nostalgia, or at least remembrance: its characters fight gamely to hold on to their places by the river, but their efforts seem doomed from the start. The book, written in the late seventies, looks back on a time and place that disappeared with the coming of the psychedelic sixties and with massive redevelopment. Nenna's children live a bit like gypsies, and the author seems to imply that the freedom they enjoy would be unthinkable these days. For all that, it's remarkably clear-eyed, a fond tribute to an ad-hoc community that flourished, in its way, before its inevitable disappearance.
    • 4/5
      This was an odd but satisfying little novel about a small community of folks living on houseboats of varying stages of decay on Battersea Reach of the River Thames. Largely in focus is Nenna, a young mother of two girls (the girls steal the show), determined to win back her husband who refuses to set foot on the boat Grace. His contention that living on a leaky houseboat in the tidal flats of the Thames is crazy contrasts with Nenna's conviction that living anyplace is fine as long as they are together. This is not a romance and, while I experienced Nenna and her daughters as forefront, there are other equally colorful characters who hold their own for memorableness, humor, and charm. Oh, and we mustn't forget Stripey the cat. The Washington Post is quoted on the front cover of my edition as saying that Offshore is "the novelistic equivalent of a Turner watercolor." It wasn't until I finished that I understood this comparison. And it's true. The novel doesn't so much tell a story as capture a moment in time in the lives of its characters, with vivid colors and a committed impressionistic style. And the setting is central to the reader's enjoyment.
    • 4/5
      This short novel describes a few weeks in the lives of various individuals living in boats moored in tidal waters at Battersea Reach. They make up an informal community and look out for each other. Some of them live there seasonally; others because they cannot afford to live elsewhere. I thought Fitzgerald did a good job of describing life on the boats; the inconvenience and the constant battle with leaks and weathering.The first part of the book was gentle, almost dreamy (but never sweet) and then it got very sad. Bad things happened, although even then they were taken very calmly. The children, Tilda and Martha, provided a humorous stand that the story really needed. Nenna and Edward, their hopeless, stuck parents were the saddest part of the story for me. I hope Nenna did go back to Canada and leave the appalling Edward behind.I'm knocking half a star off for the totally unresolved, open ending.
    • 4/5
      Picked this up recently and realized I read it in the distant past. The plot isn't fresh in my memory. I gave it 3.5 stars, assuming that if I loved it, I would probably have remebered it.
    • 4/5
      Offshore won the Booker Prize for 1979. In a rather Chekhovian manner, it tells the story of the gradual dissolution of a community of houseboat dwellers on the Battersea Reach of the Thames. They are a motley crew -- a retired naval officer and his wife, who would rather be landside; Maurice, a friendly prostitute; Willis, a marine artist who must sell his leaky boat, and Nenna with her two daughters who refuse to go to school. Although I enjoyed the book, it hasn't stuck with me very well.
    • 4/5
      The kids, Tilda and Martha, are the best parts of this book. Fitzgerald's writing is unfussy and the pacing brisk; her characters so ordinary. Yet the way she writes about them and the circumstances surrounding them are not mundane or uninteresting. On the contrary, they're all so relatable, or if they're not, they're fascinating to observe. Her stories are quiet stories written about people living, existing, bursting, shattering, loving. They're untidy, self-repressed, and blossoming but in unexpected ways. I like her books the way they are - short and readable in a sitting or two. They are best taken that way.
    • 4/5
      Fitzgerald's pleasantly low-key Booker winner from 1979. It's set in the early sixties, among a group of odd characters who live on decaying Thames barges moored at a boatyard in Chelsea. Like The Bookshop, it's a story centred around the very English concept of heroic failure (not coincidentally, several of the barges turn out to be Dunkirk veterans). The people living on the boats are all ignoring something unpleasant in their lives in the vain hope that it will go away. There's a commercially-unsuccessful rent-boy, a decrepit old painter in the Gulley Jimpson tradition, a former naval officer who doesn't want to let his wife turn him into a Home-Counties-stockbroker type, and Nenna, who's hiding from the failure of her marriage whilst her small daughters learn the skills of mudlarking and discover Swinging London in the nearby King's Road. We know from the beginning that it's a safe bet that at least one of the old boats is going to sink in the course of the story, but that's not really the point: the joy of the book is watching the ingenious and entertaining way Fitzgerald unfolds the stories of the various characters. As in The Bookshop, her very individual way of presenting small children is great fun. In her world, children are much more competent and self-assured than adults: the six-year-old Tilda, as dogmatic on the subject of ships, tides and the river as her modern coevals would be on the different species of dinosaurs, is a constant delight. And there are wonderful little throwaway lines everywhere. I loved the way she manages to cut sixties culture to size by describing the King's Road as "a playground for children", for instance (of course, she was writing this as a sixty-year-old during the era of punk and the Sloane Rangers, which probably gives you a bit of perspective).
    • 4/5
      Echoes of Dickens and Conrad, this book is an enveloping read. Introduces the reader to life on a boat in the Thames during the early sixties. The ending is sudden and leaves the reader hanging. It ends to soon.
    • 2/5
      I can't say I was impressed by this book. Bewildered maybe, but little more than that. The story centers around Nenna, a separated mother of two girls, who lives on a small house boat on the Thames with her daughters. I wasn't sure she was the main character until over half way through this short novel though, such is the level of noise and confusion with other people in the novel. I suppose in this way the writing mirrors the lives of the assortment of river-dwellers, but I cant help thinking this is accidental rather than intentional on the part of the author. I suppose you could say that the lives of the characters are described as the story unfolds, but not in a way which made me at all interested in them. This had the unfortunate consequence of making a 140 page book seem 540 pages long. There were probably 2 passages that I read again on account of being impressed by the combination of words, but I need way more than that from my Booker Prize winning books, thank you very much.
    • 4/5
      Few authors so lovingly render the ephemeral. Fewer still appreciate that the ephemeral is the real, since all lives are lives of transition and flux, whether tidal or not. The inhabitants of the aging barges on Battersea Reach, afloat (usually) on the Thames, but anchored to the shore, however tenuously, have mostly not found their place yet in the burgeoning Swinging London of the 1960s. Nenna, circumstantially estranged from her husband, Edward, lives on Grace with her two girls, Martha and Tilda, both more at home on water than land. Maurice lives on Maurice, but perhaps more aptly lives on gaslight and “friends” he meets in bars in the city. Willis, an aging marine artist, wants to sell Dreadnought in order to spend his last days ashore, but to do so he can only show it at low tide when it is not leaking quite so much. And Richard, formerly of the Royal Navy (torpedoed 3 times), well-caulked owner of Lord Jim, oversees them all, literally, since Lord Jim is by far the largest craft in their midst. But all of them are fragile, if not already broken, and only the youngest, Tilda, actually thrives.In this short novel, Penelope Fitzgerald is masterfully concise, poignant, and honest. It is a world she knows intimately, having lived it before the incessant development of 1960s London swept the Reach clean. Yet here it comes fully to life again, vital, elemental, though perhaps just out of reach. It is a novel you can read in a brief span, but you will undoubtedly return to again and again. And each visit will be a rich harvest in the flotsam and jetsam of your reading life. Highly recommended, every time.
    • 1/5
      Offshore never really got going for me. It felt as if Fitzgerald conceived the idea of a novel featuring a mixture of offbeat characters all of whom are at a turning point in their lives. Then to give it more appeal, she makes them live in houseboats in a less than desirable stretch of the River Thames. We trace their lives as they unravel or , in the case of one of the river dwellers, sink. But it’s difficult to engage with these characters or feel very interested in what happens to them because they are only sketchily depicted. Their eccentricities are not markedly eccentric, or even odd. The most interesting character for me was Maurice a male prostitute whose friendly nature is repeatedly taken advantage of who use his boat as a place to stash their stolen goods. But he is absent from the book for much of the time. Nenna, the central character, is a bohemian Canadian whose husband has left her and who is left quite literally struggling to keep things afloat. The scenes in which wanders shoeless through the streets of London late one night, are the most memorable. But it’s not enough to rescue the novel.According to a quote from the Observer on the back of my copy, Offshore is ‘a novel of crisp originality, lucid and expressive with some splendid bursts of satire’. Would that it were so. For me, the narrative sank deeper and deeper into the mud of the Thames, occasionally bobbing up for air to fool readers into thinking that something would now actually happen, only to subside even further into the depths. The experience left me feeling I’d been cheated.
    • 5/5
      Offshore is a slim and, on the surface, slight read. It tells the story of a few weeks in the lives of a group of people brought together by the fact that they all live on boats at the same moorings, on Battersea Reach in London. During these few weeks, momentous things happen to the characters - a young girl experiences her first love, a marriage falters, an affair tentatively begins, lives are ruined. But these are all narrated in such an understated way that it would be entirely possible to miss them if you weren't paying attention - and the personalities of the different characters are sketched out in the same style. One of the ways Fitzgerald achieves this is by not adding a lot of authorial explanation, so we have to interpret the significance.For example, a significant point in the faltering marriage takes place in the following exchange, embedded in a conversation about the neighbours:"I'm going home for a fortnight. It may be more than a fortnight - I don't really know how long.""When?""Oh, quite soon. I'll need some money".Richard avoided looking at her, for fear she should think he meant anything particular by it.Another sentence I really liked was: Richard patted himself to see that he had some matches on him, a gesture which appealed to Nenna, and walked off up the Embankment to catch a taxi. Again, the significant part is buried in a very normal sentence, and we have to figure out for ourselves why it was that Nenna had that reaction, and what that might mean.In many ways, the whole setting is a metaphor. The people who live on the boats inhabit a space between classifications, in the same way that the boats are a space between water and land. And to me, the book was also pointing out that even for those people who live - sensibly and normally - on land, the ground under our feet is pretty unstable, and we have to "take our chance with wind and tide".
    • 4/5
      Having read Offshore twice, I'm still not sure what to make of it. The story centers on Nena, a mother of two daughters, who lives on a barge anchored in the Thames River. Her fellow boat owners, like their boats, are an odd assortment with flaws which may lead to their downfall (or sinking). The story, itself, has no clear plot. Instead it follows these people in brief threads which may lead to no resolution. In one sense, this is a collection of related short stories woven together by common characters. Unfortunately, with Nena being a possible exception, none of the characters are fully developed or explored.The writing, however, is finely done. This was a saving feature to me of this book.
    • 3/5
      Just seemed an odd narrative about some odd people in odd situations, and the story never really went anywhere......odd. The few characters i sort of almost cared about never did anything, and the ones i wanted to know more about did even less....likewise the story. The end felt like i was mid-paragraph in the middle of a chapter part-way through a book....i thought maybe part of my book was missing.....the one positive note is that I am grateful for the chance to think about, however oddly and briefly, the fact that there are those living in boats in rivers.......felt like it had potential in the beginning but it ended up a rare overall disappointment in my reading.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book. Characters were interesting (especially Tilda -- as A.S. Byatt wrote in the introduction to Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris, Fitzgerald got Tilda right).
    • 3/5
      Well-written, concise, and evocative. The milieu of a down-at-heel backside to '60s Swinging London is conveyed through a medley of credible but dreary characters. This period and the author's staid prose style give lots of the language and references a pleasantly dated feel ('TCP', 'anorak', 'Officer' addressing a policeman). Some characters' motivations may seem a bit dated too, but without the charm gained from a completely alien setting (Enlightenment Prussia in 'The Blue Flower', to take her well-known example). So these lame and defeated characters on the Thames barges of 'Offshore' don't think like us, but are close enough in time and place for it to be harder for the modern reader to empathise. TO put it more simply, the characters are not very likeable (and this is a character-driven novel).
    • 3/5
      "Battersea Reach, ladies and gentlemen. On your right, the artistic colony. Folks live on those boats like they do on the Seine, it's the artist's life they're leading there. Yes, there's people living on those boats." (p. 16)Along the banks of the Thames, a small group of boats sit permanently anchored, serving as home not to artists, but to a ragtag group of residents who, for various reasons, have chosen to live on the river instead of on land. Their de facto leader is Richard, of the Lord Jim, by far the best-kept boat in the group. Grace is home to Nenna and her two daughters. Her husband has left them and the girls attend school only occasionally. One boat's owner allows stolen goods to be held on board. Another is trying to sell his boat, and hopes none of the other residents will tell prospective buyers about the leak. The characters were largely misfits, with humorous quirks. I was sympathetic towards Nenna, with her general awkwardness, her difficulty raising young daughters alone, and and her inability to rescue her marriage. Unfortunately however, the central theme of the novel eluded me. There were also several loose ends and incongruities in the plot. It was a light and sometimes pleasant read, but I am positively baffled as to how it won the Booker Prize. Ah well, at least it was short.
    • 5/5
      If, in your reading material, you appreciate a sublime but deliberate choice of wording which, in its calculated brevity, paints a magnificent panorama, then Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore will utterly delight – as it did me.As plain as it is titled, this book is the briefest glimpse – a snapshot in essence – into a chapter of the lives of a disparate group of barge-dwellers; who actually live ‘offshore’ on the Thames River, in the shadow of Battersea Bridge, London. And much akin with the river itself, their lives are as ordered, oft-times, by the tides that control their houseboats, and as chaotic as living on a seething, ever-changing, moving mass of water can be – amidst the interminable consternation of the surrounding land-dwellers. Drawn together by their individuality, this unique little community, full of eclectic but endearing eccentrics, is thus peculiarly-shaped, and irrevocably altered, by the every choice of dwelling in such absurdity brings – the events which occur almost preordained in their inevitability.In this book, there is so very much to like in so very little. This is my second Penelope Fitzgerald – and I have come to realise that Ms Fitzgerald is a consummate word-smith. Everything in this book is slightly askew, and intentionally so! Every word is chosen with a deliberation that in its conciseness elaborates, and discloses, such a welter of information and such colourful characterisations – which you know could never be conveyed as well, and would undoubtedly be lost, within a larger body of work – resulting in a superbly-crafted inference on the society of the time. By invoking a delicate humour on every page, this accentuates the underlying poignancy of the situation; detailing the random, indiscriminate thoughts of the barge residents - from wistful Nenna and her precocious brood to ex-navy Richard and his desire for everything to be ship-shape - discloses a complexity and a quality, a warmth, to this motley group inhabiting such a fascinating world. But best of all, in regards to this marvellous book, is the respect Ms Fitzgerald pays her reader. She knows that in her succinct exposition the reader will grasp what is left unsaid; that a suggestion and a nuance, a dry wit, is all that is required to reveal the entire picture, and to be completely understood. There is a line on every page in Offshore that I could quote to exemplify the many, many beautiful constructs the author uses. This book made me laugh-out-loud, made me despair and made me ponder; made me return again and again to the immaculately-created phrasings, and in the end, left me wanting much more. And, like the inhabitants of Battersea Reach, I am left floundering, and in two minds, and all at sea with the world – and quite ‘off’! Just remarkable!(May 1, 2009)
    • 4/5
      Penelope Fitzgerald’s Booker Prize winning novel Offshore is set in the 1960’s along the Thames and introduces a cast of eccentric and unique characters whose lives criss-cross and intersect as they go about their days on the worn out barges of the area. There is Richard, a retired navy man whose desire for organization unites the others, and Maurice who receives stolen goods, and Willis whose boat Dreadnought is fated for tragedy. But, it is perhaps Nenna who is the most interesting - a woman who has been abandoned by her husband and is trying to raise two precocious, young girls. Tilly, the youngest daughter, loves barge life and her courageous and lively spirit is infectious.As Fitzgerald’s novella progresses, it is Nenna’s domestic unhappiness which unites the characters, and it is Tilly’s innocent optimism which creates the irony in the story.Fitzgerald’s story is full of a black humor and her writing is clear and descriptive. Offshore feels much like a character study or a long short story, and its ending is both unexpected and unresolved.This was my first Fitzgerald novel, and I appreciated her wonderful use of language and development of the characters. But when I turned the last page I felt oddly disconnected and disappointed. I wanted more, yet there was no more to be had. Offshore is strongly literary in style and it is a quick read. It whet my appetite for more of Penelope Fitzgerald’s work.
    • 4/5
      Winner of the 1979 Booker Prize, this novel sparked a mild controversy, with some critics alleging that the jury went overboard for a minor, even insubstantial, offering. Short, it is. Low-calorie, it is not. The book deals with people of all ages who live in barges or houseboats on the Thames, quite literally between the land and the sea. And they (and by extension we?) are in transition between one mode of life and another, without really knowing how (or even whether) to undergo the transformation. Scenes are short, often a paragraph or two, sometimes only a sentence or a fragment. Perspective shifts from character to character, but the reader is never confused or less than fully engaged. Dialog is exact and yet suggestive. Nearly every page contains a felicitous, original touch. Just a single example, one that tickles me – of a German teenager who briefly spends an afternoon with one of the houseboat families, Fitzgerald writes: “With a faint smile the young Count turned to thank his saviour, while some colour stealed, stole, back into his pale cheeks.” Fitzgerald certainly knows the correct past tense of “to steal”, but she bleeps the reader that the German boy is not quite sure, but wants to be, just as he wants to be considered less insecure than, in fact, he is. All this subtlety for a character that appears for just a few pages. But, then, for Fitzgerald, there are no minor characters.
    • 4/5
      Persuasively captures the community existing among the houseboat dwellers on the river in London. Unflinching, courageous, and beautifully written.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful. A slim book. Set among a group of staunch individuals whose homes are reworked barges on the Thames.Read it twice. Will start reading her others. The characters are memorable and sympathetic, the protaganist's two girls are simply unforgettable. A pleasure.