It’s never to late to change one’s life

Two 50-something women learn to pilot a craft along an English canal, finding reassessment and reinvention along the way in “The Narrowboat Summer.”

In 2018, at the age of 70, Anne Youngson published her first novel, “Meet Me at the Museum,” and it was a charmer. Told through the correspondence between an English farmer’s wife and a widowed Danish museum curator, Youngson’s debut was a reminder that it’s never too late to change one’s life. 

Her second novel, “The Narrowboat Summer,” is another heartening story about the possibility of striking out in a new direction at any age. It is also a soothing read, especially welcome in these anxious times.

In writing about women on the far side of 50 who rethink their lives, you might say that the Oxfordshire, England, author is preaching what she’s practiced. After retiring from a successful career as an executive at Land Rover, Youngson switched gears and became a writer, something she’d long wanted to do. 

Although it shares themes with her first book, “The Narrowboat Summer” is a more ambitious and complex narrative. But unlike the shared archaeological interest that convincingly triggers the epistolary relationship in “Meet Me at the Museum,” the machinations required to set “Narrowboat” in motion are a stretch. Never mind. It’s worth suspending disbelief and hopping aboard for this pleasurable ride.

The novel gets off to a brisk start when two women, both in their 50s and at a crossroads in their lives, meet by chance on a towpath along the canal in Uxbridge, not far from London. Eve Warburton has just packed up her desk at the mostly male engineering firm from which she’s been let go after a long career as a planner. Heading towards Eve on the path is Sally Allsop, a classroom assistant and mother of two adult children who has recently informed her husband of 25 years that she wants to leave him. Why? Because she’s tired of his incessant, vapid chatter. What she needs, she says, is “silence and the chance to think” – a sort of gap year to figure out what really suits her.

As the two strangers simultaneously approach a narrowboat moored by the path, they are alarmed by desperate yowls emanating from its cabin. They decide to intervene. No sooner have they liberated what turns out to be a dog, than the owner of the boat shows up. Anastasia, a sharp-tongued older woman, is glad they didn’t call the police. She invites them on board the spartanly furnished boat, the Number One, for a cup of tea, and abruptly spells out her situation. She’s facing onerous medical tests and treatments and can’t afford to stay moored in Uxbridge. Also, her floating home needs to get to a boatyard in Chester for repairs before its license can be renewed.

In other words, Anastasia needs a place to stay in Uxbridge, and “someone with nothing better to do for, let’s say, the next three or four months” to skipper the Number One to Chester and back. 

Most people, of course, would flee. But this is a novel about women at loose ends who are determined to open themselves up to new experiences. Within a few pages, Anastasia is installed in Eve’s flat, and after minimal training and preparations, Eve and Sally, who barely know each other, are off together – with the dog.

Following this precipitous start, "The Narrowboat Summer" bobs along at a gentle pace as Eve and Sally wend their way slowly northward across the roughly 300 miles between Uxbridge and Chester, never exceeding the canal’s 4 mph speed limit. Their most arduous challenge is negotiating the numerous locks, sometimes working as many as 20 level changes in a single day.

Along the way, the two women navigate their differences, take turns cooking and steering, and play intense games of Scrabble. Eve is a forceful, competitive doer and a logical planner, while “naturally nice” Sally is more likely to go with the flow. Over the weeks and miles, they uncoil their thoughts about where they’ve been and what they might do after their journey has ended.

In the meantime, we learn about England’s marvelous man-made waterways (which feature hauntingly in Michael Ondaatje’s 2018 novel, “Warlight”) and the people who have plied them over the years. Built to transport goods, albeit just “wide enough to cope with a boat moving at the walking pace of a horse,” the canals could not compete with later modes of transport such as railways, Youngson writes. But as their commercial use faded, they attracted pleasure-seekers – along with a mixed bag of drifters who chose to make their home on them.

Among the pleasures of this novel is the “frame of tranquility” through which Eve and Sally – and readers – view the passing countryside. Ornery Anastasia is another delight, acerbic and curt, yet ultimately admirable.

Youngson keeps tedium at bay with updates on Anastasia’s condition and a scruffy assortment of canal people they encounter along the way – including a captivating storyteller hooked on drugs, his teenage girlfriend who sells her fabulous knitwear designs to keep food on their table, and a mysterious, shifty old man who turns up periodically, in flight from his constrained life as an accountant. This motley crew evokes the unconventional floating community living on the Thames in Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1979 Booker Prize-winning novel, “Offshore,” a probable inspiration for Youngson.

Like the locks, getting all the pieces to work together and carry this novel to its desired destination involves careful effort and engineering. The clank of narrative machinery is louder than one might wish at points, and Youngson’s vessel occasionally bumps up against the walls of the sentimental. But she lands her ending smoothly, and the result is lovely.

In addition to the Monitor, Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for NPR and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications.