Eleanor Horn's Reviews > The Service

4.5 / 5.0 The prose is gorgeous and you'll be thinking about the insanity of being female long after the last page is finished.

The Service follows three women over the course of a momentous year for those in and affected by the sex industry. The book opens in the "post-Christmas sleet" introducing Lori, a seasoned sex worker and mum to a young girl who is haunted by her past abusive relationships; Freya, a scatty student and newbie to sex work who struggles with disassociation and derealisation; and finally Paula, a middle aged journalist living in the leafy London suburbs who has taken up the cause of "rescuing" prostituted women and protecting women in general from the rise of hyper realistic sex dolls.

Miren draws brilliantly on her experience; as a journalist, as a sex worker and possibly as someone who has intimate experience of derealisation to sculpt living and breathing main characters. Her call for decriminalisation of sex work is heard loud and clear throughout the course of the book and she paints a rosy view of activism and the power of collective action to effect change.

My favourite character was Paula, her story is handled so sensitively and without judgement and she felt like the most deeply real and nuanced character I have read in a while. I deeply felt her challenge to connect with her teenaged children, her sadness and anger in grieving her mother and the agonisingly complicated relationship she had to her memories of the sometimes abusive relationship between her parents.

The novel is astonishingly ambitious. Miren attempts to tackle so many different social themes in portraying the different reasons why women do sex work and how they feel about their clients that it would be easy to feel these elements don't get the attention they deserve. She makes good choices in focusing on the areas where her experience lies and not trying to cram in side plots that go nowhere.

The action culminates in a scene at a church occupied by sex workers who are protesting laws that have further criminalised their profession. We flash quickly between the different characters' perspectives that I think has been done to convey the chaos and confusion as other people (it's a bit unclear who and how) storm into the church but this technique fell flat for me. The action gets resolved all too quickly and feels a bit unsatisfying.

Overall, this is a very worthwhile read and the writing and characterisation is exquisite. I wish more people were talking about this book!