Sea State: SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE

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Lasley has written a unique book, a cross between Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Prime of Life: reportage on the English working class that is also a lucid travelogue." — BookForum Drug testing has long been a reality for manual workers. In fact, Shaun Bailey cited these workers when he wrote a piece defending the policy. I remember people in Aberdeen saying oil companies were testing workers at the heliport before they went offshore. The industry was contracting, and finding people in breach of contract is cheaper than laying them off.

Sea State marks the arrival of a gifted and exciting new voice’ Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13 SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE PORTICO PRIZE A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF 2021 ‘It’s extraordinary. and, above all, female desire" - sometimes the author does speak about this generally, however everything is so personal and filled with self criticism, insight and analysis about how it relates to her (and not to class or society in general) I don't think much is generally applicable. There's quite a lot of sex in this short book too, and, surprisingly, it's fairly sensitively written, with a little modern vulgarity added in. On a train she meets a boxer-turned-rigger who worked on platforms in Saudi Arabia and the Falklands before moving to Piper Bravo in the North Sea. He says he gets scared lying in his bunk bed. “When they bring the [oil] containers on board at night, and you hear them: boom! You’re working on a floating bomb. A floating bomb that’s just waiting for an ignition source.” Later, after a few drinks, he tells her he once killed a man. She’s not sure whether to believe him but still lets him walk her home. Sea State is a hybrid of sorts: an investigation that is also a confession but reads a lot like a novelI’d like to say that I called my boyfriend and put our relationship out of its misery that instant. I didn’t. What I did do was make a private pact with myself, to stop lying. I would not marry him. I would not tie myself to him for the rest of my life, or even a small portion of it. That was the day I gave up pretending. I ask my friend Connor if he remembers this; he’s worked offshore for 20 years. I met Connor in a bar when I was in my 20s; he sat down next to me and asked if I wanted to come to his friend’s house to take cocaine. He’s since cut it out, because he’s in his 40s, has children and worries about his heart. At the time, his habit was curtailed only by his work schedule. Taking a leap into the unknown, Lasley breaks up with her mean boyfriend and leaves her job to move to Aberdeen, Scotland, "the oil capital of Britain." There, she wants to research a book about the masculine, working class culture of oil riggers whose livelihood is threatened by, among other things, the influx of lower-wage workers from other parts of the world. Lasley supposedly interviewed more than 100 men for this book, though you would hardly know that from reading it. That's because this book isn’t about masculinity and men, it’s about her and how she dealt with a failed relationship by dancing, drinking, doing drugsand occasionally listening to some men talk about their work in the most superficial of terms. Lasley is a good writer, which is perhaps why this bait-and-switch feels particularly frustrating.

In the 1980s, a local boy disappeared. The police told his parents he had probably run away to London. Years later, his body was found at the refinery in a tank of toluene, an industrial solvent. Teenagers used to break in, open the vats and huff the fumes. They usually did it in groups, but he had gone alone. Police surmised he had passed out before he could pull himself away from the tank’s manhole, fallen in and drowned. At its best, Sea State, does convey the aura of toxic masculinity and the pent up frustrations of men with relatively lucrative jobs for their skills who are part of a moribund industry. One specific passage is close to my heart, as a sailor who has seen comradery chronicled in sea novels from Melville through Lowry replaced with the gift of isolated technology that gives each worker his own video screen and relatively private stroke chamber: I know what he means. Some days, I still want it. Especially if I’ve had a drink, or seen actors take it on TV. The whole preparation ritual – the heaped flakes on the table, the tap of plastic on glass, the rolling of the note – makes my mouth water, the way an alcoholic’s must at the sight of vodka sloshed over ice. I don’t expect the urge will ever leave me. But it no longer nags at me during work hours, because my new job is far more enjoyable. It’s interesting. The pay is better. My legs don’t hurt. It takes you places so few books do’ Observer ‘Acidic, addictive reporting with a fictional veneer. Lasley is a gifted interlocutor.... The book’s hybrid of ethnography, journalism and disclosure might have been disastrous in the hands of someone without Lasley’s candor and style. Instead, “Sea State” accomplishes what many memoirs do not: It organizes a messy life with a clear vision.” — New York Times Book ReviewThe affair with Caden may consume most of the narrative of Sea State, but Lasley continues to work on the book that she set out to write, inducing riggers into conversation at hotel bars and strip clubs across Aberdeen. The memoir that she has actually published contains the ghostly imprint of this other book, the one that almost was. Anonymous quotes from Lasley’s interviewees appear at the start of each chapter. A few read almost like punchlines: While the alleged focus of the book drew me in, the final product ultimately left me frustrated and annoyed. This book is not what it seems to be, barely giving readers much of anything about these men and what it’s like to work at sea drilling for oil. Really, this is a memoir about an affair and a woman who is thinking about writing a book of substance but never actually does. If this makes her sound judgmental, well, she both is and isn’t. “I’m obsessed by class,” she says. “I wouldn’t claim to be working-class. I’m lower middle-class. I can write in a mannered middle-class style, but I’d rather go to the boxing than the theatre.” It pains her the way that parts of the country are seen by London, which in her eyes long since became another country in terms of its mores, and identity politics exasperate her. “Class analysis is left out, and in this country it’s so identifying. It’s so dishonest. I saw Rebecca Solnit [the American essayist] slagging off the marchers on the Capitol, talking about them as white men with all the power, imagining themselves as marginalised. I thought: grow up. They don’t have any power. They live in trailers… It’s so simplistic. The men in my book don’t have a choice. Do you think there’s a choice between living offshore for three weeks, and the dole?”

Politicians’ ideas about the drug seem to reside in the 1990s, when cocaine was the preserve of city workers, PRs and journalists. Whenever a stern new measure is tabled, they invoke the north London hypocrite, who worries more about the provenance of her coffee beans than she does the origin of her drugs. These users are alive to the travails of farmers in Peru, but care nothing for deprivation in their own borough. It’s hard to tell whether they’re real people, or an agglomeration of tropes. They feel real, because they’re never out of the news. Acidic, addictive reporting . . . Sea State’s writing alone is worth the admission price.” — Financial TimesAfter the fall, he remained bed-bound and never walked again. My sister went to see him on her way to the church. I waited in the car, fighting the irrational belief he had somehow done this on purpose. Of course, no one develops vascular dementia deliberately. Even so, he had managed to rearrange the dynamic of the day so that the bride was travelling to pay her respects to him, rather than the other way round. I know another writer, Owen, who is also an alumnus of the night-time economy. I ask if he ever took cocaine on the job. He took it on every job, he says. As a pot washer at a chain hotel. A barman at a Toby Carvery. A cashier at an all-night garage.

S ea State is so many things at once: an exploration of class, masculinity, desire, and the ways in which the work we do defines us. But alongside these huge subjects, it’s quite simply the story of a young woman who is lonely and finds herself in close proximity to a lot of lonely men. I was so impressed by how deftly Tabitha Lasley moves between the personal and the academic, and how much authority she maintains throughout. This is a truly powerful memoir.” — Mary Beth Keane, author of Ask Again, Yes She actually writes very well and I really enjoyed the book. I grew up in a part of Scotland where everyone knew someone who worked off shore, I’ve heard the same stories as Tabitha about the suicides, accidents and experiences of female workers on the rigs and don’t doubt the authenticity of the stuff she was told.

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After the meal, my mother stood up and gave a short speech. She touched on my father’s condition, the reasons for his absence. I stared into my glass and thought about my parents. My father wasn’t perfect, by any means, but he had been a good husband to my mum: decent, dependable, kind. Now, she had to keep up her end of the compact, the guarantee that underwrites every marriage. That was what partnership was.