In The Offing (Bloomsbury 2019), acclaimed author Benjamin Myers has created a tender, quiet and introspective story depicting the blossoming friendship between 16-year-old Robert Appleyard and the much older and enigmatic woman Dulcie, in the luminous period just after World War II.
Robert comes from a family of miners who spend most waking hours dirty, dusty and tired beneath the earth. He assumes this will also be his fate but procrastinates by setting off on a country walk to see some of the land and nature surrounding the area in which he lives, taking the bare necessities of sustenance, planning to sleep rough and do a day’s work here and there to get by. By chance he stumbles upon the unruly property owned by the eccentric Dulcie, an outrageous character for her time, as a woman living alone. He offers to cut back the encroaching grass and in return she offers him rich seafood, nettle tea and other flavours he has never tasted. He swims in the ocean, deciding as each day passes to cut a little more grass, fix a fence, paint a wall or repair an outbuilding. His body browns with the sun and Dulcie introduces him to poetry, intelligent conversation and a mature curiosity about the world.
Both characters are superbly written. Dulcie is gruff, obstinate and opinionated, but also generous, although she is used to being alone and doing things her own way. Her history is gradually revealed as the two become friends rather than acquaintances, and her colourful past intrigues the young man more and more each day. Robert is youth personified: energetic, questioning, open, inquiring, hungry for knowledge and food and experiences. In this intimate, quiet story, the two each bring something for the other that they didn’t realise was missing.
The novel actually opens with a chapter from the perspective of Robert as an old man, reminiscing about this period of his life. The closing chapter bookends this neatly, as he wonders about the strange but fateful turn his life took the day he met Dulcie, and how it has shaped his experiences since.
Myers writes beautifully about the natural world, landscape and the environment, and his prose is rich, literary and compelling, with authentic dialogue and a lovely development of characterisation.
This is the first book I’ve read by Myers, although he has published about seven novels, plus non-fiction and poetry. I did attempt his most recent novel Cuddy, but it didn’t resonate with me, which just goes to show that trying one book by an author isn’t necessarily enough to get a feel for their style or their work. Despite abandoning Cuddy, I absolutely adored The Offing.