THE OFFING
Benjamin Myers
Bloomsbury
“Where did life go?” asks elderly narrator Robert Appleyard at the very beginning of Benjamin Myers’ seventh novel. But narrative framing aside, The Offing is less about looking back wistfully on a cut-and-dried past and more about looking forward to an as yet unscripted future, one that is pregnant with possibility.
Robert recounts how, as a callow teenager, the Second World War “had awakened within me a sense of adventure, a wanderlust to step beyond the end of the street where the flagstones finally gave themselves to the fields … to explore whatever it was that lay beyond this shimmering mirage that turned the horizon into an undulating ocean of blossoming greens”.
Succumbing to this irresistible urge to escape the claustrophobic confines of the County Durham mining village in which he has been born and raised, he sets out on a cross-country meander towards the coast, ravenous for new experiences:
“Life was out there, ready and waiting to be eaten in greedy gulps. To be scoffed and swallowed.”
On his travels, Robert stumbles serendipitously across Dulcie Piper. A free-spirited and independent woman of astonishing vim and vigour, she sates the 16-year-old naif’s appetites – first for food, and later for spiritual and intellectual sustenance. Not, though, for carnal gratification – Myers deftly sidestepping the temptation to lapse into cliched male fantasy and turn Dulcie into a seductive Mrs Robinson.
Generous, cultured, well-travelled and brilliantly forthright, she instantly disabuses her guest of his inherited and unexamined prejudices “‘Don’t hate the Germans; many of them are just like you and me’”and sets about opening his eyes to the wider world, and especially to the joys of literature, “that secret universe”.
“It was clear that she was a wise, worldly and original person and I was none of these,” he confesses. “Yet in our brief time together I had begun to feel as if I was becoming someone else. I was approaching being myself, rather than the person I had been living as.”
For her part, Dulcie implicitly acknowledges that she is a perfect foil for the teenager ‘if I have a talent for one thing, Robert, it is seeing dormant potential, and then awakening it’”, but she is also aware that their relationship is symbiotic, “‘a two-way street’”. As the novel progresses, it becomes apparent that this flamboyant extrovert has become a recluse, her idyllic bolt-hole overlooking Robin Hood’s Bay a hermitage where she is steadily pickling herself alone. While she helps Robert to reject the future that fate has laid out for him, he enables her to dispel the dark shadows in her own past.
Myers has earned a reputation as a sensitive and sensuous chronicler of nature, and The Offing is particularly remarkable in this respect. While his previous novel The Gallows Pole told the brutal, violent tale of the Cragg Vale Coiners against a suitably stark and unforgiving natural backdrop, the main events of this book take place in the lush, verdant landscape of late spring and summer. Through Robert and Dulcie’s late-night conversations about the poetry of William Wordsworth and John Clare, Myers draws parallels to his own nature writing – a move that might be deemed cocky, were it not for the fact that his prose is so rhapsodic and richly evocative as to merit it.
Likewise, the characters’ discussion of D H Lawrence and Lady Chatterley’s Lover underlines how the pages of The Offing are equally “‘full of the fecundity of life’”, as Dulcie puts it – as well as inviting comparisons between the novel’s narrator and the working-class Nottinghamshire author born with coal dust in his hair who found escape in the form of literature and who saw the potential for post-war renewal in the rhythms of nature and in intimate connections between individuals.
But this isn’t merely a Bildungsroman or a book about a nation emerging from the wreckage of the Second World War. As the paperback cover trumpets, quoting a review in the Irish Times, The Offing is also very much “a novel for our times”. Conceived and composed in the period after the Brexit vote, it cannot be read outside of that context. Allusions are everywhere – from Robert’s assessment of an England left “scarred and shattered, a place made senseless by those in positions of power”, to Dulcie’s carpe diem exhortation
“‘See Europe at the very least while you can, because soon enough someone else will decide to try to destroy it again. And, God knows, they like to rope the young into their messes.’”
The offing, she explains to him as they look out across the water to Europe, is “that distant stretch of sea where sky and water merge”; she broadens his horizons but is only too aware that horizons can also contract.
Indeed, The Offing has become even more “a novel for our times” since it was published last year. With the world firmly in the grip of the coronavirus crisis, Dulcie’s claim that “‘We live in a most shadowed present … These are uncertain times’” rings truer than ever. Robert feels he owes it to those who have sacrificed their lives to live his own to the full, while Dulcie insists that “‘the likes of you and I, we must fight to make the world a more liveable, colourful and exciting place’” – a perfect post-pandemic rallying cry if ever there was one.
The Offing – a fat-free, naturally sweetened salve for the soul that is as invigorating as one of Robert’s sea swims – is just what we currently need.
Words: Ben Woolhead
Price: £8.99
Info: www.bloomsbury.com
