Offshore

To live in a dim world, the light on the wood dark with age. To exist for large periods of time in a way in which one's life is unknown, testing the waters for their depths, sensing the ancient forces of the earth in the pull and flow of the Thames. The lost rivers, gravitational moorings, thick lights colliding in the night like 'metal coffins'. 

To survive catastrophe, destruction and eke out a living, some pattern, in the heart of the day. To rest with one's head on the pillow at night and not be full of anxiety. Your hand unclenched, the inner wrist of certainty, the gentle folding of clothes and their placing in a cupboard an act that tilts life on earth to order and regularity.

There is something precise in the writing, something half-submerged in the way in which the words are arranged. A word is put down and two paragraphs later its shadow will emerge. The clear, calm voice of England. That's not something one might hear in a Bellow or a Roth or an Updike. There's also a tremendous sense of sympathy which comes across as natural, controlled, measured. Nothing seems superfluous. Someone, writing of her short stories, called them little gems, highly polished, cut stones. That is true. But one could also think of brief sketches made in watercolour. What remains, after all this time, except the same fundamental human gestures? The gifts we receive in the early morning light, coming to us from God knows what shore...

'She works every inch of her canvas. Her minor characters are as fully realized as her major ones. She is a novelist who watches over the fall of each sparrow...always reminding the reader of the ability of her characters to pursue independent lives behind the scenes, and their offstage activities are as important as those that are performed in public view.'

'The point of view of an amused, highly intelligent, and supremely charitable god.'

---J. Raban

No deep habits of the soul, no profound insights; no recognizable gestures, no clarity in the fullness of time. Instead, the Sanskrit heart says, Not this, not that, looks out and observes the distances, the lengthening and shortening of the shadows, the drift of the world, day by day.