the blue flower by penelope fitzgerald summary

In contrast, her young daughters Martha and Tilda are bizarrely precocious and competent, managing their bohemian lives with pragmatic ingenuity. Yet at the same time, she is resilient and stoical, her expectations of life heroically low. Her visit ends in near disaster, shoeless in a rainstorm, pursued by a lecherous stranger. Nenna is incapable of doing anything practical, even a trip to Stoke Newington on public transport seems to faze her. All live half-way lives, at the edge of both land and water.

The point of view shifts among numerous characters including Maurice, a romantic and part-time rent boy, elderly marine painter Willis and Richard, an ex-naval man now working in insurance. But chaotic Nenna James comes closest to being its heroine, and her haphazard, wilfully disordered life presumably reflects that of Penelope Fitzgerald herself, who lived on a houseboat with her children after her first marriage collapsed. It’s hard to identify a protagonist, or a clear narrative through-line. None of them quite know what they are doing, or are entirely honest with themselves, and their compromises and misdemeanours drift with the ebb and flow of the river. The narrative focuses on a group of misfit Londoners, on the posh side of classless, who live in a row of semi-derelict boats on the Thames during the 1960s.

So looking back on my reading in 2018, what stands out? The novel which made the greatest impression on me was Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, which won the Man Booker prize in 1979. As with the business of writing, novel reading is protracted, sometimes disrupted, sometimes seeming like a professional duty. Therefore, the way I consume books is a compromise, shifting between immersive engagement with the narrative and awareness of the techniques the author is using. In an ideal world, I would read everything twice, but as we know, this world is not ideal. Sally O’Reilly, Lecturer, Creative WritingĪs creative writing academics, we constantly remind students about the importance of ‘reading as a writer’, and in my own reading I sometimes wonder to what extent this should be a conscious process, and to what extent something that I try to sublimate, reading as a reader, enjoying the book in a naïve way on first reading at least.

The blue flower by penelope fitzgerald summary