I was a bit wary approaching Service by Sarah Gilmartin (2023) as I’d not long finished an issue-driven novel which I thought never quite managed to create characters who existed believably beyond the issue itself. Service has been described as a #MeToo novel, looking as it does at sexual assault and the structures that enable predators to not only get away with it, but thrive. However, when I saw it in my much-beloved charity bookshop during Cathy’s Reading Ireland Month it seemed perfect timing, and I also remembered that Susan had rated it.
The story is told from the point of view of three characters in alternating chapters.
Hannah, now in her thirties and selling her home as she and her husband divorce, looking back on time when she was a student and a waitress at T, a swanky restaurant reaping the rewards of boomtime Dublin;
“And there was Daniel, of course, we all loved Daniel. The skill, the swagger, the hair, even the naff red bandana that he sometimes wore during prep. We were in awe of him, of the fact that he didn’t seem to care about anything except the food. Serious cooking and good times, that was the dream we sold at T, over and over again.”
Daniel, the celebrity chef who oversaw T, now accused on Facebook of rape by an employee and facing criminal trial;
“Tomorrow the farce begins in earnest. Tomorrow I’ll see that ungrateful wench in person for the first time since she sat at her computer and pressed destroy.”
And his wife Julie, there throughout it all and trying to keep a home running for their teenage sons.
“I knew that you were not the kind of man who would come in the door of an evening and ask about your family. You were too full of your own stories, your voice set to megaphone inside your head, while the rest of us whispered asides. I knew this and I still said yes.”
This isn’t a he said/she said thriller – the way the stories and voices are presented it’s clear that Daniel did it. I thought this was a clever decision, as it frees Gilmartin instead to really focus on the characters’ lives within the various systems of enablement surrounding Daniel. He doesn’t see himself as a predator: why would he, when he is venerated – his toxic, controlling behaviour lauded?
“In that long, hot room that was fuelled by aggression and banter and occasional lines of speed, everything was sexualized.”
Daniel’s narrative is unreliable of course, and Gilmartin cleverly presents it in a way that the reader isn’t sure if he believes it himself. Is he consciously lying, or does he not recognise his actions as rape? He’s deluded enough to think all women want him really, and whether they say ‘no’ to him is a matter of indifference – like everything else they say. In a misogynistic culture where women are commodified and discardable the minute they reach thirty, their careers in front-of-house dependent not on skills or talent but on the approval of the straight-male gaze, where his own wife refers to ‘sluts’, he probably sees what he does as his entitlement.
I’ve seen some readers saying they vacillated with regard to the characters, but this wasn’t my experience with Hannah or Daniel. Where I did change somewhat was with Julie. I found her internalised misogyny infuriating, along with her astounding naivete that somehow a man who has plenty of women willing to sleep with him would therefore not assault anyone.
“How did I not know my husband was a predator? Somehow, I have no answer, beyond some ferocious thought, that all these years have meant nothing, marriage to mirage.”
“How do you weigh up the infinite exhibits of a decades-long marriage?”
But ultimately I saw her as a victim in the situation too, and it is Julie who pinpoints a fundamental societal attitude, so long ingrained, which silences women:
“I always had that ability, learned at such a young age – not to make a scene, not to dramatise, not to look for attention. Only the wrong kind of girls looked for attention.”
There is real tension in Hannah’s narrative as you know what is going to happen while desperately wishing it wouldn’t, and I thought the scene was handled sensitively and entirely non-gratuitously. The immediate fallout and enduring trauma are both believably portrayed.
When I initially read Service, I wondered if a limitation was the voices not being overly distinct from one another, but now, a few days on, I find Daniel’s voice has really stayed with me, the insidious toad (except I quite like toads). So unfortunately through not being able to shake him off I’ve realised my mini-criticism was mistaken!
The ending offered some hope while not being entirely unrealistic which I appreciated, not needing unrelenting bleak narratives right now. In an Author’s Note, Gilmartin explains that the barriers in the current legal system mean that the trial in the book would be unlikely to even occur in real life.
“A girl like you.
It could be said in many different ways.”
madame bibi lophile recommends 
