Sea State: SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE

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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. Lasley's own isolated situation feels similar to being marooned on one of those rigs: She's cut off from her London life and having an all-consuming affair with one of the very first guys she interviews. Ironically, in acting on her ambition to delve deep into the masculine culture of the oil rig workers, Lasley herself winds up, for a time, living the traditional suspended life of a mistress. Here however I found the style to be quite personal and, for the most part, very compelling. I grew up reading women's magazines and newspaper columns written by or for women, and this seems very familiar. The closest comparison I can make is with Liz Jones, the Mail on Sunday's weekly columnist who journals her life through the prism of her relationship problems. The book is also fairly short - combined with the punchy style, it makes for an easy, satisfying read. In that sense, I think it's succesful -the tendency of the author to digress did get a bit much for me though. The vocabulary is also fairly complex and seems just a bit engineered to convey the impression that the author is very intelligent (as compared to the rough beasts on the rig, see below). I got through over half the book in a single sitting. 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. It is very funny, sardonic even. Lasley is always the cleverest person in the room, she doesn't tell us this, it is patent.

A Recommended Read from: Vogue * USA Today * The Los Angeles Times * Publishers Weekly * The Week * Alma * Lit Hub What Lasley wants to know is what men, alone, do to one another, and how the ways that they are changed by what they do shape the way they relate to the women they meet on land. Through her interviews, she learns that the rigs are breeding grounds for “antifemale paranoia,” where men encourage one another to see women as sirens who cheat, or use pregnancies or divorces to gain money. (Around five per cent of riggers are women.) Lasley is repeatedly told that no man ever wants to get married, yet she is still surprised by the number who tell her about their affairs, which are explained as a way to “let off steam.” One man shows Lasley an ultrasound scan before hitting on her. Less surprising are those who are classically possessive, like the one who headbutts his iPad, while FaceTiming his girlfriend, because she is going out and he can do nothing about it.Lastly, there's a lot of digression about house music, and a LOT of brand name dropping, to the extent that I thought the book might have been part sponsored by Nike. 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: Sea State is, itself, a hybrid of sorts: an investigation that is also a confession but reads a lot like a novel. It is a startlingly original study of love, masculinity and the cost of a profession that few outside of it can truly understand. The cost to Lasley herself is yet to be revealed.” — The Guardian

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. When I showered in the morning, I wrote Caden’s initials, then mine, in the condensation on the glass. CD. TL. Then I drew a circle around them, so they were bound together. Smart about sexual desire and the ease of analyzing — but the difficulty of escaping — familiar gender roles, Sea State offers a close up view of the white, working-class resentments that helped fuel both Brexit and the Trump presidency. As a journalist, Lasley commits the cardinal sin of getting involved with one of her subjects; but as memoirist, her transgression saves Sea State from the tone of faintly anthropological distance that books about the working class often have.Cocaine use is rife in night jobs. I sometimes wonder what would happen if they brought testing into the sector. I think the night-time economy would probably collapse. It is hard to keep going when the body wants to be in bed; to clean tables, scrub floors and count money, after a full shift on your feet. 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. I am the manager, though this is an entirely theoretical distinction. I don’t earn any more than the kitchen staff. I have no authority. They hate me telling them what to do. At first, I put this down to my being a woman. As time goes on, I start to think that maybe they just hate me. It is an anti-authoritarian town. They are opposed to authority on principle. What have the authorities ever done for them? I put perfume of tuberose and amber in my hair. I waited four minutes exactly before answering his texts. 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.

These guys live double lives: three weeks offshore on giant rigs in the North Sea; three weeks onshore, drinking hard and reacclimating, maybe, to their families. Lasley rents a charmless apartment in Aberdeen which she likens to "a Gulf state, a desert caliphate. Women were rarely seen out alone after dark. It was full of itinerant workers, miles from home and lonely." Daily, I drilled him on the worst-case scenario. Wipe your texts every time we talk. Leave your phone out where she can see it. No new clothes to go offshore, no smashing the gym before you leave. And if she does catch you, please don’t say it was just sex. But equally, don’t tell her I was special. She will ask if I’m prettier than her, if I’m younger than her, if I let you do the things to me she won’t let you do to her. A breathtakingly bold, honest and original book, I didn't want it to end." — Decca Aitkenhead, author of All at SeaThe 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: These more sociological passages are interesting, but on the whole, Sea State’s slide into the personal doesn’t wind up feeling like a loss. Lasley’s writing is energetic and occasionally impressionistic. She is prone to self-indulgent disquisitions on the beauty of dance music like UK garage and seems nimbler with details than structures. All of this makes for a fresh and unpredictable prose style but would be an obvious liability in any bird’s-eye view of the oil industry. And perhaps most crucially, Lasley makes for as compelling a character as any of the men she speaks to.