Set in 1960's Battersea Reach, Fitzgerald's short, early novel, a Booker prize winner, features a community of disparate characters living in houseboats or barely seaworthy former barges. They include a ramshackle painter, the highly organised unofficial leader of the fleet, a rent boy, a woman wondering if her husband will return and their two streetwise children. There is scruffy charm and some poignancy in the backwater life, and much passing interest to be had in everything from changing tides to comments on Whistler and Turner.
(Tony Pratt - bwl 98 Autumn 2020 ) |
