Strange Half-lives
Tabitha Lasley, Sea State
Fourth Estate, 240pp, £14.99, ISBN 9780008390938
reviewed by Jennifer Thomson
‘Grab ‘em by the pussy.’ This is, we are told, how men talk when women aren’t there. Vulgarities. Sexual boasting. ‘Locker room’ chat. Ex-journalist Tabitha Lasley sets out to discover if this is really the case in her first book, Sea State. ‘I want to see what men are like when no women are around’, is how she explains it to two separate individuals, in conversations that bookend Sea State. Both point out the irony in this aim. It won’t work. She, a woman, will be there too. And although ostensibly about oil rig workers and their masculine world, the book is largely about Lasley herself: the breakdown of her relationship, her move from London to Aberdeen, and, most importantly, the tortured affair she begins with the first oil rig worker she interviews.
Female non-fiction has been having a moment of late, with work often orbiting previously unspeakable moments of female existence — abortion, miscarriage, abuse. Marketing for such works often stresses the bravery of the authors, and the raw and powerful nature of such writing. (In Michaela Cole’s hit series I May Destroy You, the main character tells her editor she is working on a book about assault. ‘Rape!’, says the editor, a look of glee in her eyes, ‘Fantastic!’) Lasley’s book could easily fit into this category — a thirtysomething woman ditches boyfriend and goes on painful/raw/emotionally honest journey of self-discovery. Interestingly though, it has been neither marketed nor written about in such a way — perhaps because this book is brave and raw and bold without needing to proclaim itself as such. Indeed, Lasley’s journalistic tenacity is not just bold, but terrifying. She spends her days drinking with groups of burly men, just returned from offshore or about to leave. She strikes a deal with the bouncer of a strip club to text her when it’s a busy night so she can head down. In one chapter, she drinks with a man who claims to have murdered someone a decade ago. He then walks her home alone, through the dark streets of early morning Aberdeen. It induces a reading-through-your-fingers type of paralysis. ‘This is what men always fail to grasp about women,’ she writes in another chapter, ‘We are scared of them, especially when they drink.’
The book is threaded through with casual (and often not so casual) sexism. She storms out of a conversation in the first chapter because a man has called her both ‘a whore’ and ‘easy’. (She points out the fault in his logic: ‘A whore is, by definition, not easy. You have to pay. So am I a whore, or am I easy? Which one is it?’) She learns to translate the men’s language: ‘My ex is crazy: I treat women poorly. My ex is controlling: I am a cheat. My ex is bitter: I am incapable of linking cause and effect.’ She experiences this first-hand, as her new boyfriend dreams of moving to the countryside with her and getting her pregnant, and then disappears back to his family life.
Although Lasley is interested in the world that men create when women aren’t around, Sea State is as much about class as it is about gender. The affair with her new, oil-rig-working boyfriend seems doomed from the start, given the different social worlds they inhabit. In her prior life, in London, Lasley’s Merseyside roots made her feel out of place (her Southern boyfriend didn’t like her watching ITV, calling it ‘the northern channel’) but the class distinction between her and her new beau, from Stockton on Tees, feels more acute. She buys him a book — he hasn’t read anything for 18 months. He ‘mostly lives on children’s party food’. He buys new shoes the moment that his old ones get slightly stained (‘They’ve got to be white white.’). He loves shopping, doing so with ‘a zeal for accrual — the box fresh, the brand new, the untouched.’ The spectre of his wife casts a shadow over their relationship. She’s a very different type of woman to Lasley — a married mother who has not ventured beyond her region of birth and who spends her days perfecting ‘the high finish of a woman who didn’t have to work’.
Rather than casually passing judgement on the consumerism of working-class Britain, Sea State is about what this work does to these men and their families. Oil rig workers live strange half-lives — spending weeks at a time off-shore, only to return to a home life where they can’t settle, and where domestic bliss isn’t quite as they remembered it. They experience perilous working conditions in the North Sea. Shell are alleged to adopt a protocol known as TFA — Touch Fuck All. Don’t try to change or fix anything on the rig in case it stops production. One man tells Lasley of a former colleague who was on Piper Alpha. He jumped from the helideck with another man, whose neck broke on impact with the water, killing him instantly. We all use oil, every day — Lasley forces us to look at the type of lives that allow us to do so.
The men Lasley spends time with are mostly from the North East — ‘Teesside mafia. Everybody knows everybody.’ The book’s narrative ends with Lasley taking a job in a chicken shop because she needs the money. She is back at home in the North West living with her Mum. This alone felt noteworthy — that the author is working menial labour in the ‘regions’ as a side-hustle because she really needs to, not because it’s for an Observer magazine feature. It was refreshing to read a book about Britain, moving from the North Sea to the North-East, to the Mersey and back again, and which did so effortlessly, without feeling the need to bash you on the head with its regionalism. London barely gets a look in.
I don’t know what this book is. Memoir? Journalistic account? Ethnography? I do not know where bookshops will choose to file it. It is a book about capitalism, and how working class lives and families are shaped and disfigured by rig work; it is about men and women, and what happens to relationships between the two when there is a financial imbalance; it is about Britain, and the strange economic geography of our land. At the same time, it is about Lasley herself — her desires, her home, her life. Whatever it is, it’s brilliant.
Female non-fiction has been having a moment of late, with work often orbiting previously unspeakable moments of female existence — abortion, miscarriage, abuse. Marketing for such works often stresses the bravery of the authors, and the raw and powerful nature of such writing. (In Michaela Cole’s hit series I May Destroy You, the main character tells her editor she is working on a book about assault. ‘Rape!’, says the editor, a look of glee in her eyes, ‘Fantastic!’) Lasley’s book could easily fit into this category — a thirtysomething woman ditches boyfriend and goes on painful/raw/emotionally honest journey of self-discovery. Interestingly though, it has been neither marketed nor written about in such a way — perhaps because this book is brave and raw and bold without needing to proclaim itself as such. Indeed, Lasley’s journalistic tenacity is not just bold, but terrifying. She spends her days drinking with groups of burly men, just returned from offshore or about to leave. She strikes a deal with the bouncer of a strip club to text her when it’s a busy night so she can head down. In one chapter, she drinks with a man who claims to have murdered someone a decade ago. He then walks her home alone, through the dark streets of early morning Aberdeen. It induces a reading-through-your-fingers type of paralysis. ‘This is what men always fail to grasp about women,’ she writes in another chapter, ‘We are scared of them, especially when they drink.’
The book is threaded through with casual (and often not so casual) sexism. She storms out of a conversation in the first chapter because a man has called her both ‘a whore’ and ‘easy’. (She points out the fault in his logic: ‘A whore is, by definition, not easy. You have to pay. So am I a whore, or am I easy? Which one is it?’) She learns to translate the men’s language: ‘My ex is crazy: I treat women poorly. My ex is controlling: I am a cheat. My ex is bitter: I am incapable of linking cause and effect.’ She experiences this first-hand, as her new boyfriend dreams of moving to the countryside with her and getting her pregnant, and then disappears back to his family life.
Although Lasley is interested in the world that men create when women aren’t around, Sea State is as much about class as it is about gender. The affair with her new, oil-rig-working boyfriend seems doomed from the start, given the different social worlds they inhabit. In her prior life, in London, Lasley’s Merseyside roots made her feel out of place (her Southern boyfriend didn’t like her watching ITV, calling it ‘the northern channel’) but the class distinction between her and her new beau, from Stockton on Tees, feels more acute. She buys him a book — he hasn’t read anything for 18 months. He ‘mostly lives on children’s party food’. He buys new shoes the moment that his old ones get slightly stained (‘They’ve got to be white white.’). He loves shopping, doing so with ‘a zeal for accrual — the box fresh, the brand new, the untouched.’ The spectre of his wife casts a shadow over their relationship. She’s a very different type of woman to Lasley — a married mother who has not ventured beyond her region of birth and who spends her days perfecting ‘the high finish of a woman who didn’t have to work’.
Rather than casually passing judgement on the consumerism of working-class Britain, Sea State is about what this work does to these men and their families. Oil rig workers live strange half-lives — spending weeks at a time off-shore, only to return to a home life where they can’t settle, and where domestic bliss isn’t quite as they remembered it. They experience perilous working conditions in the North Sea. Shell are alleged to adopt a protocol known as TFA — Touch Fuck All. Don’t try to change or fix anything on the rig in case it stops production. One man tells Lasley of a former colleague who was on Piper Alpha. He jumped from the helideck with another man, whose neck broke on impact with the water, killing him instantly. We all use oil, every day — Lasley forces us to look at the type of lives that allow us to do so.
The men Lasley spends time with are mostly from the North East — ‘Teesside mafia. Everybody knows everybody.’ The book’s narrative ends with Lasley taking a job in a chicken shop because she needs the money. She is back at home in the North West living with her Mum. This alone felt noteworthy — that the author is working menial labour in the ‘regions’ as a side-hustle because she really needs to, not because it’s for an Observer magazine feature. It was refreshing to read a book about Britain, moving from the North Sea to the North-East, to the Mersey and back again, and which did so effortlessly, without feeling the need to bash you on the head with its regionalism. London barely gets a look in.
I don’t know what this book is. Memoir? Journalistic account? Ethnography? I do not know where bookshops will choose to file it. It is a book about capitalism, and how working class lives and families are shaped and disfigured by rig work; it is about men and women, and what happens to relationships between the two when there is a financial imbalance; it is about Britain, and the strange economic geography of our land. At the same time, it is about Lasley herself — her desires, her home, her life. Whatever it is, it’s brilliant.