Sam Haddow
posted 13 March 2007

There is a certain sub-genre of literature, defined – usually ill-advisedly – by its subject matter rather than any stylistic or thematic qualities. No name has yet been given to it, and it encompasses books such as Berlie Doherty’s fictionalised Street Child and Adeline Yen Mah’s autobiographical Chinese Princess, to name a couple of the more successful.

They are books aimed at young people that deal – with a large-ish degree of verisimilitude – with the darker side of contemporary living. Their other unifying trope is that they are impossible to review. I say this because with these books – be they well-written and emotive or inexorable garbage – a reviewer cannot separate the work from the topic. It is nigh on impossible to objectify the suffering of children, when related to actual accounts, or areas of life still characterised by untold suffering.

So it is with Dirty Work, Julia Bell’s follow-up to her award winning debut novel Massive, which dealt with teenage eating disorders, and the infringement of the destructive world of adult fashion into the lives of impressionable teachers. Dirty Work again picks up the theme of the perversion of youth – this time through the nightmarish world of sex slavery. We are presented with two 15-year-old protagonists; Oksana, a Russian who was lured to Europe under the promise of a better life, only to be sold into prostitution, and Hope, a spoilt girl from Norwich whose teen angst and wilful destruction of simile (‘like, so boring’ etc) haven’t prepared her for the horrors that await her when she meets Oksana.

As far as a premise for a novel goes, it certainly works on paper, and whilst my initial aggravation at the blatant polarising (why did Hope have to be rich – is it necessary to pump your English character full of status just to give her that bit further to fall – surely a middle class girl would have had higher resonance for the intended demographic) wasn’t exactly answered, the narrative itself isn’t bad. There are a few cack-handed plot devices thrown in early on to get things moving (cue an incompetent middle man named Zergei who snatches Hope – who is in a coke-fuelled haze – to make up for the Ukrainian girl that committed suicide) but on the whole, it operates relatively smoothly. Within a surprisingly short amount of time, the two characters are established with rounded and flawed contours, thrown together and then…

Then it seems as though Bell has either lost interest or run out of ideas. The girls’ stories continue to be separated, as with the rest of the novel, into alternating chapters. This was fine when they were racing to their inevitable collision, but when they’re sharing a bed in a room with two freebasing Estonian prostitutes? Instead of what I’d hoped would be a Keenan/McCarthy-style prison narrative, or something similar, Oksana ducks out of the present tense completely and exists for the reader only in the surly replies she gives Hope’s incessant questioning. Her narrative focuses instead on the events which led to her being sold into prostitution. Lest anyone should be confused, the book’s blurb contains the section where Oksana explains, ‘this is where I go in my head while they pay for my body.’ OK, so one protagonist absents herself from the unfolding narrative as a defensive mechanism – fair enough, because we’ve got another one who’s very much rooted in the here and now.

…Except that, for Hope, the ‘here and now’ isn’t actually about the sex trade. She suffers occasional physical abuse, and is told to demean herself by dressing in lingerie, but that’s about it. I should probably make clear that I wasn’t actually hoping for the girls to go through any more than they did (Oksana’s first encounter, the only actual instance of sexual abuse detailed in the novel, is quite harrowing enough), but in a novel about sex slavery, I was expecting a little more about – well, sex slavery. This is a book aimed at younger people, however, and I realise that the parameters call for a certain restraint. But this leads me on to the most maddening aspect of the novel. It is made quite clear, several times, that Hope is there by mistake – even one of her ‘owners’ says, ‘You’re different from them’ (the other prostitutes). Bell seems to be putting forward the argument that privileged Brits take their security for granted (something she articulates scarily well in the first few chapters), but the fact that this is the only British girl involved in this hideous industry, and she gets special treatment, then the argument loses its focus. What had been the premise for a rather sharp and unsettling exposé on just how much we take for granted, and how quickly that can be lost to us, becomes more a bedtime fable to scare disobedient daughters.

There are elements in this that work – the unease of the opening chapters, and the grinding inevitability of Oksana’s descent into prostitution are particularly touching. If you’re looking for a novel aimed at younger people that addresses a murky area of society not usually covered in such literature, then it will serve. And of course it highlights an admirable cause, but it does little to develop the literary credibility of the nascent genre of which it is part.