In 2015, Tabitha Lasley, a former freelance magazine journalist, arrived in Aberdeen, Scotland, the United Kingdom’s oil capital, having spent four years on a novel about rig workers with nothing to show for it. (Her laptop was stolen from the apartment in London that she shared with her emotionally abusive boyfriend, whom she left when he did not sympathize with her loss.) “Sea State,” the result of her second try, was written out of the desire to “see what men are like with no women around,” as Lasley tells her editor. “But you’ll be around,” the editor replies. The exchange encapsulates the dynamic at the heart of the book, in which Lasley’s entrance into the worlds of her subjects, and the friction between them, produces the keenest insights. In Aberdeen—a city that combines “Louisiana avarice with Protestant thrift”—she insinuates herself in, “buying drinks, inviting confidences, like the tipsy hostess of a dour, exclusively male cocktail party.”
Rigs are insulated ecosystems—situated miles into the ocean, and populated mostly by men, who are stationed on board for several weeks at a time. For decades, they have been one of the few sources of well-paying blue-collar employment on the eastern shore of the U.K. My uncle worked on such rigs in the eighties. Like Lasley’s subjects, he flew by helicopter from Aberdeen, and chose the work because his options were it or the dole. At the time, the only compulsory safety training was a video that told you how to get into crash position and that, if the helicopter went down, you would die of hypothermia in under seven minutes. Often, he said, fog would force choppers to land by radar. Birds flew into the flames burning off the gases from the rig, leaving crisp carcasses strewn on the top deck.
Today, men who live in areas that were once home to chemical plants or mines are still the greatest share of the offshore workforce. Though the work pays well, it is not without its dangers. One worker Lasley interviews describes his rig as a “floating bomb.” Everyone knows the horror stories, of rigs sunk or exploded, and the industry’s shorthand, such as Shell’s “T.F.A.” (“Touch Fuck All”), which stood for a protocol that instructed riggers not to waste time on maintenance. Onboard, the claustrophobic atmosphere is intensified by a combination of physically exhausting labor, infantilization, and atomization. After their twelve-hour shifts, everyone either goes to the gym or bolts for their private cabins to watch their DVD box sets. The rigs are hothouses for masculine antagonism, because tensions among the workers cannot be resolved by fighting, which is prohibited. There is no camaraderie, little conversation, and grudges fester. Some stem from the petty conflicts that one might expect from living in close quarters, but the men’s sensitivity seems to be heightened by a backdrop of precarity. A combination of factors, including changing attitudes toward fossil fuels and a global oversupply of oil, have led the industry into a precipitous decline. The number of people employed by offshore-oil and gas operations in the North Sea has fallen every year since 2014. It is a dying way of life, whose cruelties include contracting workers to dismantle the rigs that have long supplied their livelihoods.
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.
Documenting this world involves risks, such as getting close to drunk men who have been told not to speak to journalists. Much has been made of Lasley’s brazenness, and such nerve in women has a horrible way of being chastised. (A review of the book in the Guardian ended, ominously, “The cost to Lasley herself is yet to be revealed.”) But her refusal to capitulate is what allows her to extract her material. To make these men talk, Lasley cultivates a boy’s “benign tone-deafness” to warning signs, and she learns to suppress the occasional instinct to run. One night, on a late train, a burly man wearing a fur coat, whose forehead looks as if “he has been struck with a blunt instrument,” catches her eye. I’d change carriages. Lasley strikes up a conversation, and then accompanies the man, who works on a rig called the Bruce, to the bar of his hotel, where he discloses that he once murdered someone. She doesn’t patronize the riggers by changing how she talks. “You’re very vulpine, aren’t you?” she asks one. “Do people tell you that all the time?” “No they fucking don’t,” he replies. She approaches potential interviewees in a pub, offering to buy them a drink in exchange for ten minutes of their time. At one point, she strikes a deal with a bouncer at a strip club, who texts her whenever the place is full.
Lasley’s first interviewee is an offshore worker from Teesside, an area that was once a hub of steel and chemical manufacturing. Caden has clear blue eyes, a jockey’s body, and tattoos of the names of his wife and twin daughters. He likes the gym, ironing, the autobiographies of Mafia dons, and bio-pics about soccer hooligans. Lasley spots him at an airport, where his kit bag—a kind of waterproof duffel, designed in accordance with helicopter requirements—gives him away. She approaches him, explains her project, and asks for his contact details. Caden demurs, but gives her number to a friend, who invites her to a pub with a group of fellow-riggers. Afterward, Lasley invites Caden to her hotel. Within weeks, he’s skiving off family life to sleep with Lasley in airport hotel rooms, laying the blame on the state of the sea—too rough for the chopper to take off—for not being able to make it home.
Lasley is candid about her lack of journalistic training, and she believes that the duty to protect her interviewees, who might be fired for speaking to her, trumps that of strict adherence to fact. In the book, the testimonies of a hundred and three men are condensed into those of ten composite characters, a choice that gives it a kind of novelistic cohesiveness, and also an unsettled relationship to truth. But it is her involvement with Caden—the only figure who is not a composite—that is her starkest deviation from standard journalistic practice. At the same time that he is, like any other interviewee, a source of information—she picks up the oil-rig lingo because he calls her every day he’s offshore—the two of them also become an intimate exhibit of the power dynamics between offshore workers and the women who wait for them on land.
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Whenever Caden is onshore, they take turns flying to see each other. Lasley falls in love swiftly and easily, and, before long, decides to rent an apartment in Aberdeen, blowing all of her savings. Caden, whose preferences resemble those of the people she grew up with, indulges her nostalgia for post-industrial Northern towns, such as the Liverpool of her parents’ birth. (Though Lasley does not feel like a Londoner, and describes her background as “lower-middle class,” in Aberdeen her acquired differences, like her “posh” voice, stand out.) Although the sex is underwhelming, she craves the “melisma” of his vowels. “I spent hours on the phone, making him repeat certain words,” she reports. “Say pussy again. ‘Pusseh.’ Say work again. ‘Werrrk.’ ” But the core of her desire is that Caden has no interest in her past. He’s a glitch in time, an escape route, who, in leading two lives, seems to demonstrate how easy it can be to start anew. This appeals to Lasley, who in Aberdeen renames herself often—Hadley, Saskia, Elodie—and remembers the five years that she spent with her ex-boyfriend with “a sick lurch, as when you suddenly realize you’ve forgotten something important, something crucial. And I had forgotten something crucial—that women do not get an infinite number of chances to remake their lives.”
After four months, during which the couple meet six times, Caden calls his wife, Rachel, from the rig, tells her that he wants to end their marriage, and moves in with Lasley. She is elated, but also panicked, knowing the choice cannot lead anywhere good, feeling “the tranced horror of a child who has struck a match and somehow set fire to the curtains.” They live off party food and play house with adolescent tenderness. When Rachel launches a campaign of harassment—she calls them both constantly, sends abusive text messages, tracks down Lasley’s former employers and her Aberdeen address—they hide under the duvet.
Then a letter from Rachel’s solicitor arrives, demanding that Caden pay her four thousand pounds a month for the next fifteen years. His daily salary is about seven hundred pounds, and he had already become accustomed to giving her an allowance to stay at home and look after the twins. Despite this, and his casual profligacy—at home, he has eight televisions, and his sneakers have to be brand-new—he plans to move his money into an umbrella fund, which, according to him, is what “all the lads do” to prevent their wives from getting money in a divorce. (Evidently, some men use other tactics. Time and again, Lasley hears of a rigger who threw himself overboard with his pockets full of tools. His wife was leaving him, and suicide, which insurance doesn’t pay out for, meant she wouldn’t get a dime.) Caden goes offshore, promising to come back. He never does.
The spark of Lasley’s stolen book was a rig diver who’d killed himself after getting decompression sickness, also called “the bends,” too many times. (North Sea fields are much deeper than those of the Gulf of Mexico, which were the primary site of offshore drilling until the late nineteen-sixties.) “The Bends” is also the name of a “black spot” on a road near Lasley’s childhood home, where fatal accidents are known to happen, and where she survived a crash when she was a teen-ager.
Lasley’s mind returns often to the “twirling, elastic seconds” when the car skimmed across the road, in which death felt certain and, at the same time, a new life could be sensed nearby. Her attraction to such moments lends the book a pleasing, paradoxical tidiness; it’s the work of someone who believes portents can impose order on her unravelling. Lasley’s descriptions of drugs—which she takes not infrequently, sometimes with her subjects—are the book’s most erotic passages. High at a fairground, her skin tingles when the wind lifts someone’s hair. She frames her affair with Caden as fate, telling him, “I’m glad I was robbed. I’m glad I lost my book. I’m glad I came here. If I didn’t, I never would have found you.” One has the sense that she is chasing her sixteen-year-old self, who “didn’t even register risk” but whose ability to get close to ruin was a liberation.
Despite the predictability of Caden’s ghosting, Lasley is devastated. She stops eating, stops masturbating; she cries, constantly. She knows that this is the consequence of having engulfed herself in her material. It is a tactic that demands a lot, but whose demands are inextricable from her gain. When Lasley finally answers one of Rachel’s harassing calls, defying Caden’s instructions never to do so, it is because, she confesses, “I was writing about him. I needed a denouement.” After six months in Aberdeen, Lasley moves to a small town near Liverpool, where she lives for three years while working at a takeout restaurant and writing. One day, driving on the highway, she flirts with another crash, silently enumerating the things that could go wrong, and wonders if “the death I’d cheated twenty years before was coming back to claim me.” The moment seems like the product both of the superstition that has guided her risk-taking and of the realization that she might have given up too much. “It seemed statistically impossible, in a world with so many avenues for grief, that I might glide by unscathed.”
Early on, when Lasley is still in the first flush of love, a friend tells her what a sunk-cost fallacy is. “People carry on throwing good money after bad,” the friend tells her. The quip has the ring of elegy. “If I’d known there was a name for that, my life would be so different,” Lasley remarks. Perhaps, but then she might not have staked her heart on a married oil rigger, or written a memoir of an affair that is also about a dying industry. “Sea State” is proof that there can be a reward for risks taken in the interest of keeping something that is already over, or in the process of ending, alive. Talking to her last interviewee, a fabricator on a rig, Lasley describes Caden as a con man who “defrauded women of time rather than money.” Yet six years after meeting him, she published her book. Is it possible to steal time from a writer? “We place our bets and we gamble,” Lasley writes. “We imagine we have what it takes to beat the house.”
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