Fishnet

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Fishnet
by Kirstin Innes
Black & White Publishing
ISBN: 9781785302138

Just a quick shout of a review, really, to an interesting book I saw floating by on my Twitter timeline one day and looked interesting enough for me to have a look. Fishnet, by Kirsten Innes, appeared to be a thriller set in the world of sex workers. The reality is a little more complicated than that but it is certainly set in that milieu and, I’m pleased to say, it’s very positive of that particular profession, at least in the light of the respect, intelligence and choices of the women (and men) who work in that industry. It was obvious from the start that Innes had done her homework in bringing the characters in the book to life and portraying their struggles with both authority, in the form of a building company which is scheduled to knock down their sanctuary... where the sympathetic central protagonist of the book, Fiona, works... and, of course, the somehow still in this day and age attitudes of people outside their profession unable to understand it and behaving, often unintentionally but still as damagingly, in a derogatory manner to both the lifestyle and the people who adopt it.

The book is not really a thriller but it does have a mystery at its heart and many of the encounters that make up the story take the form of an amateur investigative procedural to give it a clothes horse, so to speak, to hang the main linen of the story on. Fiona’s sister has been missing for seven years and the last time she saw her was when she showed up at her door with a newborn babe, Beth... and then she ran away in the night, leaving Fiona and her parents to bring up the child without her.

And it’s a very interesting way of doing things as the writer takes six long sections and structures them under repeat mini titles to relocate either time shifts (flashbacks and so forth) or the central character’s dealings, split between her personal life on the investigation and her colleagues at the building company. So, for instance, chapter one will be made up of a repeat cycle of cross cuts between subsections labelled either CITY and VILLAGE, chapter two would be BACK and FORTH, chapter three would be PRIVATE and PUBLIC and so one. Further adding to these, almost John DoS Passos style (if I’m remembering my USA Trilogy correctly), are little bursts of information that interrupt the narrative as Fiona feeds her growing obsession with the girls’ sex worker blogs, her inklings of her own shifting sexuality and her growing sense of camaraderie with the girls and the seduction of the lifestyle in which they work.

And, yeah, I wasn’t sure at first because the lack of ‘hard thriller’ territory from the start kind of threw me but... it didn’t take that long for me to realise, for instance, that the central premise of the missing sister, pursued quite vigorously by the central character herself, was not what the book was about. Even though it also has a mild ‘espionage’ angle to something Fiona is doing at one point. But at the same time, despite my initial reservations, I found myself quite drawn into the world in which Fiona begins to explore. This is despite the main narrative refraining, for the most part, to be specifically sexualised and maintaining a more, solid observational approach to the various women that Fiona encounters on her own personal odyssey.

Now, it has to be said, there are a few clichés explored in the book. For example, I knew exactly where Fiona was going to end up as a person by the end of the novel and there were a few dramatic points in the book that some readers will definitely see coming. However, saying that, because of the unwillingness on the writer’s part to fall into a specific trap of allowing these various plot points to become the raison d'être of the actual scenes in which they turn up... almost in a laid back manner... it kind of doesn’t matter if you see certain story beats coming from afar because, it’s more about the writing, the structure and the attitude to various professions and people which are, in actual fact, the core of the novel. At least that's the way it seems to me.

What this means, in case you were wondering, is that I still found myself thoroughly gripped by the character of Fiona and her relationships with the various people, including her young ‘daughter’, more than anything else in the novel. So, yeah, I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed Fishnet and, well, I’m sorry it’s such a short review this time but thank you so much to the author for portraying the majority of the sex workers here in a positive light... or perhaps, more importantly, in a respectful light (after all, some escorts can also be terrible human beings, as much as the next person). It was just nice to see that profession normalised and written about with a certain amount of knowledge about the subject (see Innes afterword about how she researched this one) and with a sympathetic eye. Glad I bought this one, for sure.