A man's world… Tabitha Lasley's extraordinary account of the lives of offshore oil workers

A certain kind of journalist will sometimes ask herself: how far would I go for a story? Is there anything I wouldn’t do, or say, or be? For a long time, Tabitha Lasley was definitely not that kind of journalist. The frustrations of her job at a London property magazine were never enough to cause her to throw off what she regards now as her lassitude; the feeling that at least she could pay her share of the rent reined her in. But then, overnight, everything changed. In the course of a single phone call, she understood that it was time to leave her boyfriend. “I’m quite a coward,” she says. “I think most people are. But at a certain point, the prospect of staying in that relationship became more scary to me than the prospect of jumping into the unknown.” Newly homeless, it was perhaps inevitable that her relationship with risk would also change. Having handed in her notice, she packed up her meagre possessions – how sad they looked; how reproachful – and moved to Aberdeen, to research a book she had long dreamed of writing, about North Sea oil rigs and the men who risk their lives working on them.

It was a serious project. She was fascinated by the rigs, their isolation and danger. She wanted to know what men are like “without women around”. But she was also, inwardly, a mess. She and the very first man she interviewed, an oil worker she now calls Caden (this is not his real name), began seeing each other, and soon after this – minutes after this, if we’re honest – he left his wife and children in Stockton-on-Tees, and moved into the flat she’d rented in one of Aberdeen’s edgier vicinities. “I think if he’d been number 42, it wouldn’t have happened,” she says. “But if you come out of a punitive relationship, and a man is nice to you, it’s like getting into a warm bath after years of cold showers.” She knew it was a catastrophe. She and Caden were like tourists in one another’s lands, each of them only half-fluent in the other’s language. Both were on the run from disaster at home. But that isn’t to say that she didn’t love him. She did, and so she clung on – until, that is, he went back to his wife. Then she could only cling on to her mobile phone, and wait, and hope, and in the meantime, work (the only balm, unless you count drink).

Aberdeen, a city ‘made of Louisiana avarice and Protestant thrift’. Photograph: David Robertson/Alamy

What happens when a journalist crosses a line? This is another question some of us sometimes ask ourselves. Lasley knew her relationship with Caden had muddied the water in which she wanted to swim. It wasn’t only that her judgment might be shot (weren’t they all the same, these men, sleeping with women who were not their wives as they waited for the helicopter to take them to the rig?). Aberdeen is a small city, and the oil workers, itinerant and needing to let off steam, frequent the same bars and hotels. People would talk. They would know about her and Caden, and this would get in the way of the confidences she wanted them to share (as if these weren’t hard enough to come by already; oil companies do not look favourably on workers who speak to journalists). How would her practised semi-flirtatiousness – journalistic determination disguised as pliancy – look to them now? She kept going: she spoke to more than 100 men before she finally packed up and left. But in the end, there seemed only one thing to do with her transgression. Somehow, it would have to be incorporated into the book. Her love affair, and the assignment she had set herself, would have to be as inseparable on the page as they were in the long, lonely months she spent in Aberdeen.

She went back home to her family in the Wirral, and got a job in a chicken shop in Ellesmere Port – the only one she could find – and when she wasn’t shovelling chips, she worked on her manuscript. “I didn’t have a choice,” she says. “I had no backup plan. I’d ripped up my life.” After three years, she had a book. The first agent who saw it told her it didn’t work. Either she should write about oil rigs, or she should write about her sex life, but this weird hybrid really wouldn’t do. “I went home and cried after that. I was 37. I’d committed hara-kiri on my career.” But then the novelist Jon McGregor, whom she has never met but who happens to be her best friend’s brother-in-law, sent a chapter to his agent, and she got it immediately: its rawness and its power; its inordinately firm hold, at once fiery and cold-eyed, on such matters as class, money and masculinity; its singular setting. Soon, Lasley had a publisher, and enough cash to put the fried chicken behind her. “I can live on it for a while,” she says now, uncertainly, fiddling with her hair. (She is talking to me via Zoom from the north-west.)

Sea State will be published this week, almost six years to the day after she first arrived in Aberdeen, and by any measure it’s extraordinary. It takes you to places so few books do: to Aberdeen, a city made of “Louisiana avarice and Protestant thrift”; to the rusting hulk of the rigs, their atmosphere “somewhere between a prison and a school”; to Ellesmere Port, where the poor go “round and round, always owing nine out of ten”. It gets inside the kind of heads that are mostly ignored by publishing: Caden, with his devotion to box-fresh trainers and every kind of children’s party food, is not the sort of man you meet often in hardbacks.

Lasley writes unapologetically, describing all of these things just as they are, no pussy-footing around. If she’s sympathetic to her subjects and the lives they’ve no choice but to lead – the deprivation in their post-industrial, mostly northern communities leaves them with no option but to take work offshore – she’s not about to patronise them by making excuses for their bad behaviour.

Not, of course, that she’s an angel herself – or even, sometimes, any more sensible than they are. Alone in a dark alley with another half-cut bloke she’s only just met, you worry for her. You want to tell her to ring for a taxi. To run. To phone a friend. “This is what men often fail to grasp about women,” she writes. “We are scared of them, especially when they drink.” But only rarely does her fear send her scurrying home. She is so brave, and never more so than when abandoned. How exactingly she writes of heartbreak: the strange humiliation that comes with rejection, though you know you’ve done nothing to deserve it; the abjection that cannot be eased, irrespective of the fact that he’s not, and never will be, worthy of you. (Every woman will recognise these things.) She has no self-pity, but nor does she fall back on the platitudes of self-help, telling herself to move on, as if love were just another item on a supermarket conveyor belt. There is no quick route to recovery. Going on a date would be like “trying to treat a heroin addiction with Calpol”. Like the men on the rigs, aching for home as they begin their three-week stints offshore, their monotonous 12-hour shifts, she must butch it out. Just like them, she is deracinated, all at sea.

How does she feel about the publication of her book? Is she nervous? “When I was writing, I made a decision just to put down what was in my head,” she says, her words tumbling out (she sits, cross-legged on a carpeted floor, in a grey sweatshirt, her eyes as big as teacups). “I didn’t think about the consequences. But now I’m starting to worry: what if everyone thinks I’m awful?” Who has read it so far? “My mum finished it the other day. I wouldn’t let her read it for ages. She cried. She thinks it’s really sad.” What about Caden? “My primary concern is that his identity is protected. He’s got a family to support. That’s important to me. But he’s not a reader. I don’t imagine he will read it. It’s not an airport novel.”

The best thing about Sea State, she says, is that it has given her back the time she wasted on him. “I’ve made it into something. I didn’t lose it, after all.” The pain of his going was terrible. It left her reeling; it was a bereavement. But it makes her sense of wellbeing now seem extreme, like those days after illness when you feel as if you’re Wonder Woman, practically able to fly.

The true subject of her book, she believes, is money. Those with it have power, those without it have none. If she hadn’t learned this when she left her boyfriend, the lesson soon stuck in Aberdeen. The offshore men have no choice but to work in extremely dangerous conditions: the coal and steel industries having largely packed up in the places where they were born, the shoddily maintained rigs, now coming to the end of their lives, are their only option. And the same goes for the women they leave behind. All they can do is wait, and then put up with whatever kind of man it is who knocks on the door a month later (Lasley’s interviewees repeatedly tell her how hard it is for them to acclimatise; the shabby reality of home never lives up to the dream of doll’s house perfection). “For a middle-class woman, not to get married might be a feminist statement,” says Lasley. “But in a working-class marriage, the dynamic is different. The men, often, still control the money, and if you control the money, you control the marriage. Working-class women are not waiting on a ring because they’re dreaming of a big, fairy princess day; they’re waiting on it because they’re not protected financially otherwise.”

So what did she learn about how men are when there are no women around? She smiles. “Nothing good,” she says. “Men and women become more similar when they have similar economic power. The more money a man has, the more entitled he’ll be, while a woman whose work has no financial value is going to be seen as worth less – we all live by the index of capitalist society.” Though oil workers are not so well paid now as in the past, they’re still, relatively speaking, cash rich. But they’re also institutionalised, and this turns them into stereotypes. “I was a bit of an innocent; a serial monogamist. The trip was an education. They said the same things over and over again, the same lines. They were like hurdy-gurdies. I’ve become, belatedly, quite good at unpicking what men say. Every time a man approaches me now, I think: what’s in it for me? Usually the answer is: not enough.” In her book, she offers translations. “My ex is controlling: I am a cheat. My ex is bitter: I am incapable of linking cause and effect. You’re different to other birds: I believe women are more or less interchangeable.”

If this makes her sound judgmental, well, she both is and isn’t. “I’m obsessed by class,” she says. “I wouldn’t claim to be working-class. I’m lower middle-class. I can write in a mannered middle-class style, but I’d rather go to the boxing than the theatre.” It pains her the way that parts of the country are seen by London, which in her eyes long since became another country in terms of its mores, and identity politics exasperate her. “Class analysis is left out, and in this country it’s so identifying. It’s so dishonest. I saw Rebecca Solnit [the American essayist] slagging off the marchers on the Capitol, talking about them as white men with all the power, imagining themselves as marginalised. I thought: grow up. They don’t have any power. They live in trailers… It’s so simplistic. The men in my book don’t have a choice. Do you think there’s a choice between living offshore for three weeks, and the dole?”

She was the only journalist she knew who wasn’t shocked by the EU referendum result. In Aberdeen, where the oil industry was contracting, the men were all worried for their future, and felt abandoned by the Labour party, too busy waging a culture war to advocate for them. Places like Teesside once had mining and steel; now it was all call centres and zero-hour contracts. Offshore, European workers were prepared to do the same jobs for a third of the money.

In Sea State, Lasley’s account of life on the rigs is threaded through the story of her and Caden, a process so lightly done you hardly notice all the jargon she has picked up, the insider information. She knows the Brent Charlie is three hours by helicopter in an oncoming wind, and that no one likes working on it (too many men, too small a gym), while the Ninian Central is notoriously hard to get off (flights home could be cancelled for any number of reasons, including geese on the runway at Scatsta in the Shetlands). She’s cognisant of the complex tension between production and safety on the rigs, and of the ever-present fear of explosions. The course employees take before they go offshore, in which they’re strapped into a simulator that’s submerged in a swimming pool, is about as useful in reality, she writes, as an air steward’s safety demonstration. In the old days, the men played darts and pool after their shift. Now they retreat to their cabins to stare at their devices – and it drives them mad. One man headbutts his iPad because his girlfriend is going out, and he can’t stop her. They live two lives, one offshore and one on land, and in the aftermath of Caden she understands what this feels like, for even as she’s working, her mind is always somewhere else.

For a long while, Lasley’s life felt precarious, as if she might just fall clean off the edge of it, like a man from a rig. But a lot of time has passed since. All this was before she signed with the Wylie Agency, the home of Martin Amis and Sally Rooney; before a long and admiring review of Sea State appeared in the London Review of Books. If such precariousness helped her, she doesn’t mourn its passing one bit. What is she going to do next? Is she off to – I don’t know – sail the high seas with Somalian pirates? She shakes her head. No. She’s working on a novel now. “It’s set in a girls’ school, on a marsh, and I’m very pleased with the setting,” she says. For a second, I’m disconcerted. Then it occurs to me. Isn’t this her territory all over? An enclosed, single-sex world. Water, water, everywhere. Only this time it’s women, with no men around. In both senses of the word, a quagmire.

• Sea State is published by Fourth Estate on 4 February (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply