Offshore

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It’s not that Fitzgerald’s work is pious, or even kindly –‘geniuses are not nice people,’ as Byatt saw. ‘She blinded herself, in short, by pretending for a while that human beings are not divided into exterminators and exterminatees, with the former, at any given moment, predominating,’ Fitzgerald writes of her protagonist in The Bookshop, a novel that opens on a quiet vignette of English nature: a heron swallowing an eel, the eel struggling to escape, both creatures trapped for ever because ‘they had taken on too much.’ It’s that this numinous dimension gives weight and bearing to the poles around which the work revolves, as seen in a very late story, ‘The Red-Haired Girl’ (1998). On the one hand: ‘There is nothing really lasting, nothing that will endure, except the sincere expression of the actual conditions of life. Conditions in the potato patch, in the hayfield, at the washtub, in the open street!’ And on the other: ‘The withering sense of insignificance [that] can bring one as low as grief.’ It's hard to be too cynical, however, when the writing is so clear and effective. Everywhere in the foreground is Fitzgerald's amiable wit, but behind that a deeper plangent tone. The two combine like a well-made gin and tonic: light, but heady. I recently finished your novel Offshore. It was a pleasant contrast to the previous novel I read, which was Crime and Punishment. From lengthy Russian existential horror to slight English whimsy! Like lying down in a sunlit meadow after being involved in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Great link, Max. Probably best that, after two more decades of relentless productivity, this episode is somewhat in the past — though I will note that I’m among the only bloggers on The Complete Booker to have a positive impression of this book (and it remains very positive a year later). I haven’t read the Golding or the Naipaul, though I’ve read other works by each author. Based on those, I can see why some in the committee thought they were masterful and others — well — not masterful. 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.

When she had finished, Fitzgerald toyed with calling the novel “Nellie and Lisa”, but was dissuaded by her editor Stuart Proffitt at Harper Collins in London, who offered “The Coming of Spring”, a phrase that his author swiftly improved upon. Decision is torment for anyone with imagination... [because] you multiply the things you might have done and now never can".In a rather curious coda, Edward arrives, drunk, to give Nenna her purse and a present. He gets as far as Maurice, where he and Maurice drink whisky together. Maurice breaks free of her mooring in the storm: ‘It was in this way that Maurice, with the two of them clinging on for dear life, put out on the tide’. Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (eds): The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (London: Batsford, 1990), pp. 377–378. Jenny Turner, "In the Potato Patch: Review of Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee". London Review of Books. 19 December 2013. A houseboat is perhaps the perfect setting to dramatise in a low key how precarious is our every effort at constructing a secure foothold in life. I had a friend who lived on a houseboat on Battersea Reach and I remember how every creak and lurch was both a call to adventure and a reminder of one's vulnerability. You might say the world is constantly moving beneath all of us but only those who live on boats are fully aware of it. A House of Air: Selected Writings (U.S. title The Afterlife) edited by Terence Dooley with Mandy Kirkby and Chris Carduff, with an introduction by Hermione Lee (2003)

Commuting from Northampton was already going on, although not for cash-strapped young professionals desperate for a toehold on the property ladder, and who can only dream of these hours: The omission that really seems a pity has to do with that famous late Fitzgerald method: ‘How is it done?’; ‘I kept asking myself how it was done’; ‘So how does she do it?’, all the reviewers wanted to know. Towards the end of her life Fitzgerald sold two lots of post-sinking papers to the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, including notes and drafts for the late novels. If you looked at these, I imagine, you’d learn a lot about how she ‘did it’, building then shattering and compressing the piles of information, but Lee doesn’t have much to say about this. The advantages of youth, "Tilda cared nothing for the future, and had, as a result, a great capacity for happiness." Also, "Her heart didn't rule her memory... she was spared that inconvenience."Fitzgerald seemed set for early success, and yet published her first novel in her sixties. Illustration by Conor Langton The landscape reflects the fortunes of its inhabitants – the characters feel with each tide "the patches, strains and gaps in their craft, as if they were weak places in their own bodies", and when Nenna attempts a disastrous reconciliation with her husband, there is a predictably violent storm. Fitzgerald is adept at evoking the atmosphere of late 1960s London with rich period detail but beyond this the book feels slight and inconclusive, meandering along with only the sketchiest plot. Novels that concentrate on the minutiae of behaviour at the expense of a rip-roaring narrative can be tremendously successful, but only if the reader truly cares about the characters. I found myself unsympathetically disposed to almost everyone in Offshore, especially the whimsical Nenna, who seems to believe her self-indulgent life is terribly hard. Since Fitzgerald lived there the boats are no longer restricted to flushing their toilets on a falling tide, and residents and visitors no longer need to clamber from one boat to another. But the boat owners are in protracted disputes with the owners of the moorings who are apparently seeking more expensive boats paying higher fees, and the owners of older and smaller boats fear being pushed off.

It was, she would say later, her favourite book, and she liked to tease by telling some admirers that she had never been to Russia in her life, and others by saying she’d often been there. Proffitt remembers the mischievous way in which Fitzgerald projected versions of herself on friends and acquaintances. Her work is similarly multifaceted, with a fascination for the world’s flotsam and jetsam – the oddball, the outcast and the marginal.I was totally drawn into the atmosphere of the book, and the characters will stay with me for a long time. Overall, Offshore is a book I'd unreservedly recommend, but not if you go for fast, complex plot. My thanks to Cecily for recommending this wonderful book to me! Fitzgerald has been compared in her qualities of social comedy and irony to Jane Austen. The comparison is just in many ways, but ultimately unsatisfactory, for she had a metaphysical quality which is less apparent in Jane Austen - and Jane Austen was not the only novelist of that period by whom she was influenced. She spoke with enthusiasm of the way in which Sir Walter Scott mixed up fictional and real characters, and this is reflected in the appearance of the dying Gramsci, in Innocence, and of Fichte, Goethe and Schlegel in The Blue Flower. Fitzgerald’s novels, Byatt concludes, are best approached as ‘very English versions of European metaphysical fables’– English, maybe, in the sense that Muriel Spark was Scottish and Isak Dinesen Danish, and that Marguerite Duras was French. Byatt does not make this point, but it’s worth noticing, surely, that this minor modern tradition often attracts women writers, maybe because its minority and smallness work well with limited resources, or because its irony makes sense to writers in secret protest over the limitations within which they work. As a conventional literary career, Fitzgerald’s life’s work was, as one reviewer put it, ‘an awful hash’. But really and truly, in what universe does the phrase ‘literary career’ make the slightest sense? Not on a leaky houseboat, when life is a daily struggle to look after all the people you have to look after. Nor, presumably, in the realms of ethical life and spirituality. Though she said and wrote little about it, Fitzgerald was a practising Anglican, and when she went on a coach tour of ‘the Holy Land’ in the early 1990s, headed straight for the Jordan to be rebaptised. Fitzgerald has an uncanny ability to beautifully portray her characters and their situations. There is a sadness to this book, but I never felt sad. The author's wry humor and the attitude of the boat dwellers lifts the spirit. Even at the end of this short novel, like the water of an approaching storm, these lovable people of the water are unsettled. Life will be changing, but they are survivors and they will endure. Oh, a gentleman’s county,’ Pinkie replied, wallowing through his barrier of ice, ‘Say Northamptonshire. You can drive up every morning easily, be in the office by ten, down in the evening by half past six.