Set in a houseboat community on Battersea reach in the 1960s, Offshore is full of richly eccentric characters who are terrifically English: a terrifically English estate agent trying to sell a leaking barge, a terrifically English layabout, a terrifically English male prostitute, and, so on. For them there is simply nothing like messing about in houseboats. But it's not all mudlarks and Whistler nocturnes down on the waterfront; behind the brass-bound portholes holds are leaking and hearts are breaking…. Ms Fitzgerald has a wayward touch with metaphors. Do boat-dwellers really go around saying 'I won't go down without a struggle'? And she has a distracting didactic streak…. Some of the scenes in Offshore are as affecting as they are intended to be, but there are rather too many characters in the book and not enough people. It was Ronald Knox, the subject of an admirable biography by Ms...