Offshore

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The next day Richard is attacked by Harry and so badly injured he needs emergency surgery to save his life.

The houseboats are permanently moored; their movement is limited to bobbing up and down on the tide. I had at that point already read several of them, and so it seemed a fairly achievable list – although I admit there are a few on the list that I don’t fancy much. In describing a group of people rather than zooming in on just a few individuals the story loses its impact. It's in the way we float in and out of each other's spaces, wafting airs of unknowable lives and unimaginable baggage, and leaving us with momentarily vivid yet inevitably vague images of the other.A mile and a half down Green Lanes, half a mile down Nassington (sic) Green Road, one and a half miles the wrong way down Balls Pond Road, two miles down Kingsland Road, and then she was lost”. 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.

I tried to force a possible comparison of this novella with the much longer Our Mutual Friend as there’s an allusion to those who’d robbed drowned bodies in the Thames; as well as the two children finding treasures in the shoreline mud a la the dust heaps in the Dickens. At the end the little community is broken up, with two boats for sale, one sunk, and Maurice swept away in a storm to an undisclosed fate. What was praised as brevity, I felt it was a paltry and undeveloped narrative that jumped from one character to the next in a schizophrenic fashion. I was wondering if this was some deliberate alienation device or if you just had some kind of major brain fade when you wrote this, and no one, agents, editors, reviewers, nobody noticed.By the end of this thankfully short book, I was no wiser about any of the characters' struggles, although there were a few weak attempts to show their isolation and outcast status in society. An exquisite little novel in which not much happens until the end, and yet, due to storms of all kinds, the whole world of each protagonist changes irrevocably.