Book review: Sea State, by Tabitha Lasley
“In London, it was just about possible that an unclaimed man of thirty-four was normal. In the provinces, it hinted at an intractable defect of character.” – Page 74
Blue collar
That great sentence above – Jane Austen-like, in its authority and humour – is typical of this lively, original author. Tabitha Lasley gave up her job as a journalist and left London to write her first book. She immersed herself in the inner workings of Aberdeen, the centre of the UK’s oil industry. She interviewed 103 men, and the result is a gem of a read. It’s a vivid picture of the author’s life, and of life on and off the offshore oil rigs, in that monochrome town.
I know this world. For 23 years I travelled to Aberdeen fairly often, for client work – a white-collar outsider in a blue-collar world. The oil industry has been the foundation of the city for sixty years. It will still be producing oil in 2050, but its peak will have passed. It’s a grim town. Village-like. Everyone knows everybody else. Lasley says it’s “a town made of Louisiana avarice and Protestant thrift.”
The joy of books
Sea State is like cold water splashed in your face. Lasley doesn’t go ‘undercover’ as such, but she does go ‘native’ in ways she never imagined. The book skilfully navigates the choppy waters of objective documentary, alongside the author’s adventures in adulthood.
The book reminded me, as great art does, of many other things – JD Salinger, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and High Fidelity. Clear-eyed, self-deprecating and honest.
Most of all, the book stands shoulder to shoulder with Richard Hoggart’s classic examination of Northern England’s working-class life, ‘The Uses of Literacy’ (1957). And with George Orwell’s brilliant reportage – ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, and ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’. Lasley has a great eye and ear for Northern folk – their language, angles, shapes, the way they walk, think and talk. Aberdeen princesses and Tyneside tradesmen.
Her subjects say things like: –
– “No man ever wants to get married. It’s always for they girlfriends.”
– “Whatever they did. They did it for they kids.”
– “Are you sure?”
– “Yes. I’m shower.”
She’s never condescending, never patronising.
The book starts and ends with real car crashes. And sandwiched between them is the car crash of her emotional life – we see what’s coming, but it doesn’t diminish the impact. The icy North Sea acts as a metaphor for her relationship with one of her subjects. “It was finished. Commerce moves forward with the faithless trajectory of a shark, discarding what is old, outmoded, obsolete.”
Petrodollars
There’s a YouTube interview from the 1970s, with the great actor Richard Burton on The Dick Cavett Show. He talked about his youth in the Welsh mining town of Port Talbot. Everyone wanted to be a miner, with their arrogant strut around the town – they were lords of the manor.
Thus, the oilmen of Aberdeen. Well paid, long stretches alone at sea, libertarian in their romantic entanglements. Aberdeen has the highest per capita concentration of millionaires in the UK. But there is nothing to do in Aberdeen other than drink and shop.
All this may come across, quite wrongly, as slightly misanthropic. These men seem to echo her division of Aberdeen bars “into three categories: tacky, rough and boring.” But it reminds us that, when we see the troubles of others, we’d gladly keep our own. It is a life affirming book.
James Neophytou