Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore (1979)
Creatures neither of firm land nor water
In 1979, 66-year-old Patrick White withdrew The Twyborn Affair from consideration for the Booker Prize ‘to give younger writers a chance’: ageism in the cloak of generosity, as if only the young can be new (he was also ‘worried the women among the judges might not favour him’).1
Happily (and controversially), the winner that year was Penelope Fitzgerald for Offshore – she was four years younger than White, and had published her first novel when she was 60.
All of Fitzgerald’s books are worth reading – and there is an argument that her final four novels (of nine) are the masterpieces. But if my boat were sinking, I’d save Offshore.
The narrator of The Bookshop (1978) divides human beings into ‘exterminators and exterminatees’, and for the rest of her life Fitzgerald used the term ‘exterminatees’ to describe both herself and the bulk of her characters. Isabel Coixet’s subtle and very enjoyable film of The Bookshop rewords this, unfortunately, as ‘exterminators and exterminated’, which misses the point: exterminatees are battlers and drifters who usually, somehow, manage to muddle through.
Not much happens in this tragicomedy about drifters living on the Thames while 1960s London swings on without them (the children swing a little, in several beautifully rendered fairy-tale expeditions to the King’s Road) – but in the way not much happens in the plays of Chekhov.
So Everything Happens.
The barge-dwellers, creatures neither of firm land nor water, would have liked to be more respectable than they were. They aspired towards the Chelsea shore, where, in the early 1960s, many thousands lived with sensible occupations and adequate amounts of money. But a certain failure, distressing to themselves, to be like other people, caused them to sink back, with so much else that drifted or was washed up, into the mud moorings of the great tideway.
Just look at how much is packed into that short – at once Chekhovian and Dickensian – passage.
It’s a wonderful book.
David Marr, Patrick White: A Life (Sydney: Random Century, 1991; repr. Sydney: Vintage, 1992), p. 591.