I’m not entirely sure what to make of Lasley’s work of auto-ficción. The book tells the tale of the author’s mission to explore masculinity in the North Sea oil fields. Her London life going nowhere, she heads to Aberdeen in order to interview men who work on the rigs. At the end of the book we learn she interviewed 103 men, some of whose testimonies are inserted between the eight chapters. What’s evident is that the vast majority of this material doesn’t make it into the book. Instead, the book becomes something else, an account of female desire and frustration. She begins an affair with a married oil worker, which has a predictably short shelf life and becomes the centrepiece of the book, before he returns to his wife. It feels slightly like therapy at times, a chance for the writer to reconnect with her northern roots, to engage with a working class Britain that has been left behind. That she ends up working in a fast food joint in an undisclosed Northern city in the final chapter feels like the most authentic aspect of the book, in so far as it seems clear that the affair with the oil rig worker was always going to be a doomed mismatch. One wonders how it would have gone down if a male writer had gone into a predominantly female world for the benefit of research and ended up with a fetching partner, then writing about their sex life and the inevitable failure of the relationship. Whilst the book might be more fictional than it pretends to be, there’s still something slightly unsettling about Lasley’s project, which ends up telling us more about class than gender.
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