NINTH BIRTHDAY SPECIAL FEATURE: guest Michèle Roberts chooses OFFSHORE by Penelope Fitzgerald

 

 "Her genius is to record her characters’ flounderings with infinite compassion. Her imagination works as a kind of embrace, both tender and supremely intelligent."

Photograph: Viv Pegram

Michèle Roberts is half-French and half-English. She has published fifteen novels, plus poetry, memoir, essays and artist's books. Her first cookery book French Cooking for One came out in 2024. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and Professor Emeritus at the University of East Anglia. She lives in London.

My (highly subjective) definition of a classic novel is one that I regularly re-read. Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore (1979) perfectly fits that bill. I enjoy it more every time I read it, relishing its celebration of unconventional attitudes, its sharp observations of the thrills and dangers of life afloat, its wry, dry humour that makes me burst out laughing. Fitzgerald’s humour is rooted in her lack of sentimentality, her honesty about human behaviour, the messes we make, our illogical yearnings, the way we sabotage ourselves. Her genius is to record her characters’ flounderings with infinite compassion. Her imagination works as a kind of embrace, both tender and supremely intelligent.

The novel’s ending is pre-figured in its beginning. Grace, a leaky old barge with a rotting anchor, no cabin doors and unreliable plumbing, is moored at Battersea Reach on the river Thames. Other nearby boats are in similarly dodgy condition. Sooner or later, we begin to suspect, disaster will occur; possibly even drowning.

On board these rickety, rackety craft live an eccentric crew of neighbours, all lovers of the water in different ways. Chief among them, on Grace, is Nenna James, her two young daughters Martha and Tilda. Nenna is estranged from her husband, who skulks in a rented room in far off north-east London. One strand of the engaging plot concerns Nenna’s hapless attempts to stay afloat morally and financially, to keep an eye on her truant children, to deal with her need for love and sex. Fitzgerald draws splendid sketches of the earnest priest visiting from the local convent school Martha and Tilda attend, the hopeful marine artist trying to sell his boat while knowing it is riddled with leaks, the chancer-thief hiding his stash of stolen hairdryers below decks on another craft nearby, the kindly ex-naval stalwart who tries always to do the right thing: “Duty is what no-one else will do at the moment. Fortunately he did not have to define duty. War service … and his whole temperament before and since, had done that before him.” Even Nenna’s cat, Stripey, is given a portrait, a place in the story.

Fitzgerald writes well about men. In these pages they may be unheroic, self-deluding and occasionally incompetent (just like the female characters) but they are never mocked. Richard, the ex-naval officer, says to Nenna: “I can’t for the life of me see why, if you really feel something, it’s got to be talked about. In fact, I should have thought it lost something, if you follow me, if you put it into words.” Later in the chapter he does manage to pursue his conversation with Nenna, and to act on his feelings. When they return from a trip in his dinghy and tie up alongside his boat, Lord Jim, he realises “He had to do the right thing. A captain goes last onto his ship, but a man goes first into a tricky situation … Their sense of control wavered, ebbed, and changed places.”

Nenna’s younger daughter Tilda regularly swarms up the mast of the barge, the better to survey the movements of people below, the swelling tides, the shifting light. These are all lovingly, beautifully and accurately described. Tilda stands for the novelist herself, sometimes seemingly omniscient and sometimes inhabiting a close-up perspective, surveying the world she inhabits and has brought into being and valuing its goodness mingled with its flaws.

The major delight of this short, packed novel, for me, lies in its brilliant writing, which of course creates and illuminates its story and its characters. In the gap between land and river, wharf and deck, Penelope Fitzgerald entrancingly suggests that we can find and explore both freedom and belonging.

Offshore is published by Harper Collins.

Michèle Roberts' Negative Capability: a diary of surviving is reviewed here by Jill Dawson.

 

Guest review by Jill Dawson: NEGATIVE CAPABILITY by Michèle Roberts

"Feels like being in a café with Michèle, enjoying a glass of French wine and listening to her being funny, irreverent and political, passionate and indiscreet ..."

Jill Dawson is the author of ten novels, including The Crime Writer, about Patricia Highsmith. The latest is The Language of Birds, about the nanny murdered in the household of Lord Lucan in 1974. She runs a mentoring scheme where established writers work with new ones, Gold Dust Mentoring.

Following a series of devastating rejections, novelist and poet Michèle Roberts decided to keep an account of her life in order to make sense of her shattered sense of self. This wonderful, fearless, surprising memoir is the result. I have been recommending it lately to all my writing students because if there’s one thing all writers need to understand it’s how to cope with rejection, how to survive it and carry on writing.

I should state here that I know Michèle (she was my boss, the Director of the MA in Creative Writing when I taught at UEA) so I don’t doubt I’m biased, but I loved her writing long before I met her: its sexy openness, daring experimentation, vividness and warmth. If you haven’t read her, along with poetry and memoir and short stories, there are fourteen novels. Daughters of the House, shortlisted for the Booker, is a good place to start. 

I devoured this. An honest insight into how another writer – one as established as Roberts no less – feels when a novel gets bounced around by agents and publishers is rare. The book could be read as a companion to her earlier memoir, Paper Houses, which tells of her formative years as a young feminist in the 1970s. Alongside her thoughts on writing, on Creative Writing students who want to produce ‘marketable commodities’, set against her own passionate desire to make art and take risks, there is also a glorious exploration of food, sex, friendship, loss, feminism, art and religion. This intimate memoir feels like being in a café with Michèle, enjoying a glass of French wine and listening to her being funny, irreverent and political, passionate and indiscreet, (although this artlessness, the creation of such a natural-sounding voice is of course the skill of an accomplished writer who makes it look easy).

In one chapter, reading Roberts on rejecting the idea that the male gaze creates desire, I was struck by how powerfully her thinking had influenced me in my twenties. The idea of the radical nature of actively desiring, feeling desire as a woman and not just wanting to be desired, reflected back at twice your natural sexiness is a theme that comes up in my novels a lot. Since I was reading Michèle Roberts in the 1980s at the start of my writing life, I am aware of how much I owe her.

‘Negative capability’ she reminds us, is a term Keats used in a letter to a friend, meaning ‘to be capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’ Dwelling in the not-knowing, not being able, is of course so much easier to talk about, preach, than to actually practise. Might the concept be extended not just to writing but to living? Perhaps it could more broadly refer to all situations where a person felt out of control, even to ‘not being published, not being read’?

‘Just treading water, swimming, just lying on my back, floating in the present, the buoyant present holding me up and rocking me’, she suggests.

If you want to be buoyed up, nourished, encouraged to be fully alive, to challenge and to doubt, this memoir is a joy from start to finish.

Negative Capability is published by Sandstone Press.