Offshore Penelope Fitzgerald (Collins £4.50) Brothers at War Oliver Knox
(Collins £4.50) Penelope Fitzgerald prefaces her new novel about houseboat-dwellers on the Thames with a slyly apposite quotation from Dante; it comes from the point where Dante asks Virgil why some of the damned are suffering on a greasy marsh, lashed by wind and rain, rather than inside the infernal city itself. Virgil explains that they are less offensive to God because they have only been incontinent, not deceitful or violent. The only violent character in the novel is Harry, a sinister criminal who uses the houseboat of Maurice, a sympathetic male prostitute, as a repository for stolen goods, emerging only now and again from the mysterious city, and eventually assaulting with a spanner one of the well-intentioned water-dwellers. Nenna, existing penuriously with her two daughters aged six and 12 and longing for the return of her hopeless husband, is incompetent rather than incontinent, though she does, after a funny and pathetic journey in pursuit of the husband, spend one night with the stiff, correct Richard, who lives a fantasy Navy life on his shipshape boat and drives his upper-class wife to drink. The apparent muddle of life is both captured with detailed preciseness and discreetly shaped into a tale wherein one can ask what was who's fault, though the water-dwellers are innocents and their greatest sins seem to be indecision, white lies, or too much self-reproach. The pleasures and hazards of their position are tangibly recreated, and the two daughters are splendidly particular, especially in the social comedy of their encounters with the shore world. Oliver Knox is Penelope Fitzgerald's cousin and their publishers no doubt hoped that they would be reviewed together. His book is not as good as hers, however. Pat rick hates his older brother Edward and the story proceeds through a series of episodes, widely spaced in time, that show him devoured by this sibling rivalry and unable to spare much feeling for anything else. Edward is not particularly hateful, simply handsome and successful, and their mother's favourite. Patrick is quite detached about himself and resigned to the fact that his pointless feud has poisoned his life. Also, blinded by jealousy, Patrick remains unaware of his brother's true character and of any insecurities he might have — until, rather awkwardly, he learns of them from Edward's ex-wife on an Irish seashore at the age of 52, this last episode bringing us up to 1977. He has no opportunity to use this new-found insight, as soon afterwards Edward is run over, and killed. Oliver Knox writes elegantly, as one would expect, but to build a whole novel round Patrick, endlessly re-calibrating the instruments with which he gauges his own self-abasement, was perhaps unwise.
Emma Fisher
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