Paperback review: Fishnet by Kirstin Innes

Six years has passed since Fiona Leonard’s younger sister, Rona, was last seen in Edinburgh, her disappearance leaving an indelible mark on the lives of Fiona and her parents. Perhaps as a reaction to her sister’s boldness and thirst for adventure, Fiona has opted for a conventional, unremarkable life, working in the office of a construction firm and living at home with her parents, who help her to look after young daughter Beth. And now Fiona’s discovery, while up north on a hen weekend, that Rona was working as an escort shortly before she went missing, is a revelation she’s finding it hard to come to terms with.

Coincidentally, her firm’s latest construction project involves demolishing a sex workers’ drop-in centre, sparking a demonstration outside their offices. Meeting the protesters deepens Fiona’s growing preoccupation with sex work. Partly to understand her sister, and maybe even to find clues to where she might have gone, Fiona immerses herself in escorts’ blogs, adverts and reviews, attending a meeting aimed at stopping redevelopment of the site and trying, with only partial success, to befriend a Polish student who supplements her income with prostitution.

“I find it exciting in spite of myself. In spite of the bits of me that are repulsed,” she explains, her fascination with prostitution driven not only by curiosity about her sister’s fate but also her own dissatisfaction with her mundane life, her dormant sexuality and the possibilities for reinventing herself. The tantalising lure of a world completely outside her experience starts to transform Fiona, straining her relationships with friends and colleagues and threatening to cost her her job.

Four years of research went into this novel, and the voices of the women Kirstin Innes interviewed come through strongly in the finished work. Fishnet is peppered with blog entries, speeches and arguments which reject the assumption, voiced most forcefully in the book by the well-meaning councillor Claire Buchanan, that sex workers are damaged people who must be rescued from a life of constant exploitation and abuse. Innes’s characters fight back against the stereotype, refusing to be characterised as victims and angrily dismissing Buchanan’s plans for new services which will only be offered to escorts who strive to move into “proper, dignified work”. Innes addresses the dangers of legislating on people’s behalf without consulting them and forces the reader to ask who is really empowered here.

At times, the didactic tone threatens to overwhelm the story, but that’s kept at bay by characters who are sympathetically presented, convincing and relatable. Fiona’s dramatic and daunting reappraisal of her whole life, her ambivalence towards her sister, her faltering rediscovery of her sexuality and the redemptive thread that surfaces towards the end raise it far above the level of polemic. Republished by Black & White after the sad collapse of Freight, it’s a book that deserves to stay in print for as long as possible, a strong, thought-provoking novel of the type that provokes discussion and changes minds.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT