Sea State
Tabitha Lasley Fourth Estate £14.99
Tabitha Lasley was in her mid-30s and had finally ended a relationship with a dreadful boyfriend when she quit her job on a woman’s magazine in London and moved to Aberdeen to embark on a long-held plan of writing a book about men who worked on oil rigs. The idea was ‘to see what men were like when no women were around’ (women make up just three per cent of offshore workers).
Hanging around the airport accosting offshore workers to see if they’d be interviewed, she meets Caden, a married man passing through the city before returning to his wife and young twins in Stockton-on-Tees. The Teesside ‘Mafia’, we learn, has a long history of allocating rig jobs to cronies with no qualifications and fabricated CVs.
Industry insights like this, dotted around this memoir, are fascinating. Oil, Lasley tells us, is one of the final remaining opportunities, outside sport, where British, working-class men can earn decent money. But as with so many industries, margins are tightening, wages are falling and standards increasingly compromised. There are eye-opening revelations about the cost-cutting and inefficiency that have resulted in so many oil-rig disasters such as the 1988 Piper Alpha catastrophe, in which 167 men died. Equally intriguing are Lasley’s mentions of the risks these men – ‘more like mercenaries’ – accept with their well-paid postings: ‘hostagetaking in Libya, piracy in West Africa, insurgents in Iraq, ice-floes in Arctic Russia’. But such nuggets are far outweighed by the details of the tawdry affair Lasley embarks on with Caden, complete with sub-Fifty Shades Of Grey scenes (‘My fingers made contact with the silky panels of his ribcage’). Like all the riggers Lasley encounters, Caden is unedifyingly misogynistic and materialistic, with no interests except splashing his wages on expensive tat. He rapidly dumps his family for Lasley (her description of his understandably furious wife is coldly condescending). Equally abruptly, he returns to them, leaving Lasley – mystifyingly – devastated. The memoir is well written, but it’s impossible to work out if it’s a Bridget Jones riff with added drills or a hardhitting exposé of a sub-culture employing about 150,000 people. By seemingly trying to be both, it fails.