The theme for my book club this time is Rivers. I loved There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak and I will definitely talk about that novel, but I wanted to read something else as well. I googled novels about rivers and this came up. I have read and watched The Book Shop, so this was the perfect choice.
Here’s the blurb …
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.
Offshore is a dry, genuinely funny novel, set among the houseboat community who rise and fall with the tide of the Thames on Battersea Reach. Living between land and water, they feel as if they belong to neither…
Maurice, a male prostitute, is the sympathetic friend to whom all the others turn. Nenna loves her husband but can’t get him back; her children run wild on the muddy foreshore. She feels drawn to Richard, the ex-RNVR city man whose converted minesweeper dominates the Reach. Is he sexually attractive because he can fold maps the right way? With this and other questions waiting to be answered, Offshore offers a delightful glimpse of the workings of an eccentric community.
As I haven’t read the introduction yet, I might be missing some of the more literary or subtle points.
I stayed in Battersea on my recent trip to London, and suffice to say this stretch of the Thames has been gentrified.
I would call this an ensemble novel, no one major character or view point. For a short period of time we follow the lives of a small house boat community – the boats (apart from one) are all a bit battered as are the people by life and circumstances, but they are kind and look out for each other.
The writing is beautiful, evocative of the place and time, insightful, and, at times, witty.
Here are some of my favourite quotes
And each one of them felt the patches, strains and gaps in their craft as if they were weak places in their own bodies.
I’m afraid I can’t claim to know much about knitting
Tilda cared nothing for the future, and had, as a result, a great capacity for happiness.
She was still at the RSM then, violin first study, and she fell in love as only a violinist can.
A review