“There isn’t one kind of happiness, there’s all kinds. Decision is torment for anyone with imagination. When you decide, you multiply the things you might have done and now never can.”
A quiet, melancholy book about a group of people living on houseboats on the river Thames.
For such a short book, it took me longer to read than expected. There's not much of a plot here, and nothing exciting really happens until the last thirty pages of the book. Usually when a book lacks plot, it makes up for it with its characters. I found Offshore to be lacking on both ends. Most of the characters had their own issues and unique personalities, but not enough time was spent on them. Out of all the characters, we get the most details about Nenna and her problems, which still felt lacking. The author barely touches the surface of any of these characters.
I normally don't mind an open ending in novels, but given this book's brevity, I don't think there needed to be so many unanswered questions by the end.
So, with not much plot and hardly any character development, this proved to be a disappointing read, especially since a premise like this seemed really fascinating to me at first. This is not what I expected of a Booker Prize winner.
At 132 pages, Offshore is shortest novel to win the Booker Prize. Penelope Fitzgerald won the prize in 1979.
Comments