Review: The Service by Frankie Miren
In December last year, I took a day trip to Oxford, a city where I spent many days as a child running around bookshops. This time, I ended up in Blackwells on Broad St, opposite the Bodleian Library, exploring their LGBTQ+ section. I walked out with a bagful of new books published by presses I’d never heard of, all recommended by a fantastically helpful member of staff called Ilaria. One of those books was The Service by Frankie Miren, published by London-based Influx Press.
The Service intertwines the stories of three very different women whose lives are connected by the sex industry. Lori is a single mother and a domestic abuse survivor who makes her living as a prostitute in London. The anonymity that her profession affords her also doubles as a way to hide from her violent ex-boyfriend. Freya is a university student strung out on a variety of substances who experiences dissociative behaviour and frequent hallucinations that verge on the mystical. At the start of the book, she is new to sex work. Paula is a freelance journalist and mother working on sex-related stories for a right-wing newspaper including police crackdowns on existing brothels and the shift in the sex industry caused by the arrival of sexbots.
At the start of the novel, new government regulation takes a platform that prostitutes use to schedule and vet clients offline. Overnight the profession is thrown into chaos as contact details, chatrooms, and e-booking systems vanish, forcing prostitutes to revert to older methods of drumming up clients – stickers in phone boxes, flyers and soliciting – all of which lack the crucial ability to conduct background checks.
The Service uses this premise to show just how much the sex workers involved in the industry rely on this work, with many living from payment to payment to cover rent, childcare, food, upkeep and other necessities. While a few are high-end call girls, these for the most part are the exception. Miren takes us into their lives and explores the duality of their existence – the personas they create to protect their real lives from the stigma attached to their profession – and the damage done when the police, journalists and others rip away this protection – either unwittingly or deliberately.
The intertwining of the three perspectives works really well, with Lori, Freya and multiple supporting characters embodying a wide spectrum of women working in the profession. Paula’s sexbot storyline never feels completely integrated into the story, and doesn’t quite earn its place in the narrative, but her role as a tabloid journalist highlights the vast gap in understanding between the realities of sex work and the myths perpetuated to sell news in an industry obsessed with scandal.
The writing in The Service is also excellent and the book is a real page-turner. While the sex industry is used as background in plenty of novels, it’s rare to see it explored in such depth and with such understanding and empathy. Indeed, the Service is a book that could create a whole new genre, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing.