Being stuck at home in Northern Italy while the deadly virus wreaks its havoc outdoors, I find myself looking for books that express a humane, honest and unsentimental view of the world. I struck gold with Ben Myer’s latest novel.
Last year, I read this Durhan-born author’s ‘Gallows Pole’ which I enjoyed although I felt that the women in the story were too thinly drawn. ‘Thankfully. this is never an issue in ‘The Offing’ (Bloomsbury , 2019).
Set in the aftermath of the second world war, it introduces readers to Dulcie Piper, as fun and feisty a female character as anyone could wish for. She it is who befriends, feeds and mentors a 16 year old lad, Robert Appleyard. These two outsiders meet by chance after he leaves his a pit village in Northern England on foot in search of freedom and adventure.
Robert’s desire to explore new horizons finds favour with this aging, free-spirited spinster. Dulcie is the kind of wise aunt everyone would love to have. She encourages Robert in his “act of escapology and rebellion.” Seemingly, his only alternative is follow the family tradition and become a coal miner. She gently, yet deliberately, nudges him in another direction.
Dulcie’s fierce independence and defiance of convention is signalled when tells him that “plain speaking and direct action are my favoured modes of communication” and in the scathing attitude towards those she calls the “janitors of mediocrity”.
She urges the young man to travel mindfully, read widely and also to “Live and love as many mouths, hands and clammy holes as you can cram yourself into, and then, when you find someone who satisfies your soul too, you give yourself to them entirely.”
The novel’s title denotes a distant stretch of sea where sky and water merge; a word used in the work of the real life poetess Romy Landau who inspired Myers to write this story. The ghost of Romy haunts Dulcie and the enigma of the relationship between these two women is a vital part of the plot.
In one sense this is a simple rites of passage story in which Robert discovers ways to escape the narrow confines of his working class background. But it is so much more besides. Myers celebrates the natural world and finds poetry in everyday details whilst also stressing the need to seize and savour life’s fleeting pleasures.
For, as the older and wiser Robert comes to appreciate, “Life is long when you’re young and short when you’re old, but tenuous at any time.”
