Offshore

Product Information

Nenna is a quondam classical musician, sweet but generally hopeless at life skills - in a way an attractive middle class woman could still just about carry off back then - separated from her equally incompetent and disorganised husband; her two daughters are exactly the sort of clever children that fans of books like this one would have wanted to be friends with when *they* were kids themselves - though to older eyes, one has taken on rather a lot of codependent / young carer characteristics. The effect is maintained by using correct nautical terms, for example the tide is “making” rather than just coming in. The storm has blown away the gangplank between Maurice and Grace and, almost delirious with drink, the two men climb down Maurice 's fixed ladder, intending somehow to cross the wild water between the two boats. Believe it or not the whole above is conducted without the other aware of any double entendre although it's clearly intentional - on the part of our author. 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.

Everyone lives between land and water, but each is also caught in some other dichotomy: childhood or adulthood; togetherness or separation; comfort or poverty; in or out of love; life or death; artistry or manual labour; dreams or cold reality. The tidal flow of the river, the rise and fall of the boats, the mud along the river bank – the interactions of her characters come together to create a wonderful sense of time and place. Their dwelling is determined by something in their characters: 'They aspired towards the Chelsea shore….

In describing a group of people rather than zooming in on just a few individuals the story loses its impact. He chairs meetings of the boat-owners, at which he insists that everyone should be addressed by the name of their boat; he has named his own boat “Lord Jim”, and sees nothing funny about being so addressed. The preface is followed by a very interesting introduction—which I took the time to listen to twice!

Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook).

Eventually a kindly taxi driver picks Nenna up and takes her back to Battersea Reach for nothing, where it seems her emotional life is going to reach a resolution. It is Nenna’s domestic predicament that, as it deepens, draws the relations among this scrubby community together into ever more complex and comic patterns. Sometimes it leads to an impulsive decision (which I may or may not regret), other times I try to pass the decision to someone else, or just avoid making it altogether. On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of the slightly disreputable, the temporarily lost, and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the great river’s tides. I can’t turn over The Times so that the pages lie flat, I can’t fold up a map in the right creases, I can’t draw corks, I can’t drive in nails straight, I can’t.

She married as a student but is now estranged from her husband, Edward, who refuses to live on the Grace. The much-talked about bond between these houseboat dwellers merely culminated in a few sit togethers after-hours. The book may be classified as a novel, but it is what it is as a result of the author’s own experiences. What I dislike about Davies’ narration is that he chants; the lines are read with a rhythmic beat that I find unnatural. Tilda is perhaps the least convincing character, which is a shame, as it could be fixed by making her 10, rather than 6.The barge-dwellers, creatures neither of firm land nor water would have liked to be more respectable than they were. Most are Thames barges, and there are several rather romantic references to their former lives sailing down the river and along the east coast, both in the author’s own voice and in Tilda’s daydream.