Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring (Everyman's Library) Review

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Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring (Everyman's Library) ReviewOffshore, based on ten years spent living on a Thames houseboat that sank twice, did not work for me and I bailed by page 20. Its opening is chaotic and unfocused and the author fails to intimate that there is a story here worth following. The other two novels in this edition, however, are completely successful. We discern in her work the long shadow of Ivy Compton-Burnett, famous for acidic, bizarrely pointed dialogue, an inheritance Fitzgerald tempered with a tender respect for people on their own terms.
Human Voices, about working at the BBC during the war, is a fascinating and intricate series of interlocking stories, each serving to illuminate the others from a different angle. Fitzgerald is at her greatest here: she does not have the burden of artificially creating some past era, and her use of everyday trivia provides a richly textured tapestry of life and attitudes readers can connect with. The ending is perfect and perfectly Fitzgerald: tart, apt, sad, darkly comical, and more than slightly surreal.
The Beginning of Spring, concerning a British merchant family living in Moscow just before the Revolution, is simply marvelous. So much vivid detail, by turns minute or sweeping, put us right in the picture, yet, unlike Offshore, those details are firmly subsumed under a strong, affecting, and well-focused story. Satisfying, first-rate Fitzgerald.
Those who have not yet sampled this writer should start with the two Everyman's Library volumes, each offering three novels. The books are beautifully produced and comforting to hold, with good introductions and a chronology of the author's life.Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring (Everyman's Library) Overview(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)After publishing her first novel in 1977 at the age of sixty-one, Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) went on to become one of the most remarkable and highly acclaimed English writers of the last century. Each of the three novels gathered here vividly and unforgettably conjures up an entire world.The Booker Prize-winning novel Offshore limns the marginal existence of an eccentric assortment of barge dwellers on the Thames in the early 1960s, a group of misfits who are drawn to life on the muddy river in exile from the world of the landlocked. Human Voices takes us behind the scenes at the BBC during World War II, as world-weary directors and nubile young assistants attempt to save Britain's heritage and keep Britons calm in the face of a feared German invasion. In The Beginning of Spring, a struggling English printer living in Moscow in 1913 is abandoned by his wife and left alone to care for his three young children in the face of the impending revolution. Fitzgerald is a genius of the relevant detail and the deftly sketched context, and these narrative gems are marvels of compassion, wit, and piercing insight.

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