Sea State
TABITHA LASLEY
(4th ESTATE, 240 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • tel 020 7799 4064

According to Tabitha Lasley, who spent six months interviewing oil-rig workers in Aberdeen, “Oil is one of the last avenues of blue-collar opportunity in this country, one of the few sectors open to working-class men – outside of sport – that still pays well.” But, as Lasley reveals, there is a shallowness to life on these deep-water platforms. We learn that oil is ruthless, dangerous, boring. Shorn of the lighthouse keeper’s transcendent altruism, the job’s only glamour is material: “they bought ­powerful cars … expensive clothes, good shoes, strong cocaine.”

The book takes its name from the ­conditions which may disbar or delay flights home, and also creates a sense of these platforms as rogue mini-states, accountable to no one save the “asset holders” who control them. The oil industry does not come out of the book well. Lasley sketches a history of the North Sea rigs, including disasters on rigs such as Piper Alpha, which exploded in 1988 killing 165 men. Afterwards safety controls were tightened, but they continued to feel tokenistic. For instance, helicopter escape training was (and still is) conducted in swimming pools, almost comically divorced from the reality of a crash in the North Sea (having undergone this same training, I can confirm this).