A Son of the Rock

Black & White, 2018, 345 p.

I read and reviewed Innes’s second novel Scabby Queen two years ago. Fishnet was her first novel and her expertise as a writer is evident from the start.

Six years after her sister, Rona, had disappeared, Fiona Leonard learns that Rona had been making her living as a prostitute. This sends Fiona anew into a search for Rona, trying to track her down, to contact people from Rona’s past, a search complicated by having daughter Bethan to worry about, and an office job as a filing clerk to maintain. In the end her search becomes a quest into the sex industry, what leads people to that line of work, how they feel about it.

The text is interspersed with extracts from prostitutes’ blogs, their online adverts and a few client’s comments on rating sites. Most (though not all) of the clients only want what these adverts call the “girlfriend experience” – vanilla sex, a kiss and a cuddle, a sympathetic ear.

A few passages towards the start and end of the book give us some of Rona’s experiences in her own words.

It is all extremely well written with rounded characters – nobody here is a stereotype, all impress as living, breathing humans.

As Fiona delves deeper into the culture of the sex industry the book almost by default makes the case for better understanding of the nature of such work, that attitudes to prostitution, the perception of it as something to be deplored and whose workers need rescuing from it, comes from a deep-rooted (and no doubt patriarchal) sense that women don’t – indeed can’t – like sex, that those who sell it have no choice in the matter and are necessarily being exploited. A prostitute calling herself Sonja tells Fiona, “‘What people call “the sex industry” is not always, not completely, a bad thing. That just because a person sells their sexual skills, it does not mean that their life is – bam! – forever ruined.’” (Sonja is herself engaged to a man who knows what her line of work is and is not much troubled by it, and later they get married.)

However, the women Fiona meets and talks to are by and large not “street girls” nor those who have been trafficked for the purpose. Instead, they work for themselves, from home (incalls) or occasionally in clients’ hotel rooms (outcalls,) in what might be called the more salubrious end of the sex industry. They also tend to look out for each other. I idly wondered if all sex work became more like this, as well as not being criminalised nor kept under the carpet, would there even be an insalubrious aspect of it?

Innes’s extensive research is nevertheless worn lightly, the knowledge she imparts about the sex industry is unfolded organically, never gratuitously. The story within Fishnet is compelling and its telling assured.

Pedant’s corner:- “In a dumpster” (this is not a Scottish – nor British – usage,) “shrunk away” (shrank away,) a missing quote mark at the start of a piece of dialogue, “fresh air kniving my skin” (knifing my skin,) “I take fulsome, competent notes” (the context was not one of unnecessary, over the top, praise, or oleaginous [which is what fulsome means,] but of excessive attention to detail,) “pyjamed limbs” (pyjama’d limbs,) shrunk (shrank.)