“Everybody thinks they understand what the word prostitute means. It’s this idea of victimhood, of badness and helplessness,” Kirstin Innes told the Herald Scotland.
“Laws are made without even talking to the people whose lives they are going to affect. We assume that these people are victims and it’s a kindness to speak for them. That comes with pity. And if you’re pitying somebody you can’t really empathise with them.”
It’s possible to question the logic of that last sentence – but there’s no doubting that Innes’s debut novel, Fishnet, is an effective act of empathy. It took four years to write and research, with Innes carrying out extensive online research and interviews with sex workers, as well as soul searching about whether, as an outsider, she had the “right” to talk about prostitution. Fortunately, after taking the sensible decision to position her narrator as someone going on a similar journey of discovery to herself, she decided that she did.
“I called myself a feminist. I had done women’s studies courses at university, and my feminism told me that sex work, or prostitution as we called it at the time, was wrong and something that we had to rescue these poor women from,” she told The Skinny.
“What was happening to me was that my politics were being completely flipped on their head by this.”
Fiona Leonard experiences a similar turnaround. She becomes obsessed with prostitution after discovering that her sister Rona - who disappeared several years before the start of the narrative - was turning tricks. Thanks to a rather too fortunate coincidence, she gets to know some other prostitutes. They’ve been holding protests outside Fiona’s office (a construction company intent on turning their shelter into a shopping mall), so she takes them tea, gets talking and soon finds herself asking if prostitution always has to involve exploitation, and even if it can be a viable career option. Is it, in fact, any worse than working in her dead end job? Or plenty of the other dispiriting and degrading careers on offer in 21st-century capitalist society?
Summed up like that, the plot might sound unsubtle. It probably is. The tone can also seem hectoring. Innes has sneaked in quite a few lectures on prostitution in the guise of blog entries. They make interesting points, but feel clumsy. There’s also occasional awkwardness in the style. I bristled at the apparent casual racism in the use of “English accents” as a shorthand for a moral turpitude, for instance. Worst of all, Fishnet is written in the modish present tense when it would be much better in the past. The timeline gets confused and absurdities creep in. “The fuzz sinking in already, the bit when you feel the welch and warp of the booze around the limits of your vision; that’s happening,” says Fiona. “I noticed it beginning about half an hour ago and decided to go with it, not to counter the acid sharps of my cheap white wine saliva …” There follows an entirely sober, measured and carefully analytical narration of ongoing drunkenness, which should be read out in every creative writing class in the UK to encourage writers to think more carefully about tense.
Elsewhere, however, this is an impressive debut. When it isn’t supposed to be inebriated, that sober voice is one of the novel’s great assets. Fiona is warm and thoughtful and intelligent: a trustworthy guide through rough terrain. And there’s no doubt that Innes is brave to march headlong into such an unforgiving landscape. She asks difficult and brave questions about prostitution. She is clever enough to avoid direct answers, but also able enough to give a considered exploration of all sides of the issues. Crucially, the novel works because it shows how these questions matter to individual humans. Because it’s so full of empathy. Innes presents convincing characters, living believable lives, and so she is able to dig deeper into these emotive issues than facts and stats alone can hope to go.
She’s also very good at invoking the dull claustrophobia, indignity and hopelessness of menial office work, not to mention weaving out a good yarn. In spite of the lectures, reading Fishnet never felt like a duty. I wanted to know what happened to the sister and it felt like it mattered. This is an important book, in spite of those rough edges.
