Canberra Times

Pub: Canberra Times
Pubdate: Saturday 10th of September 2011
Edition: Copyright: 2011
Ghosts of the fallen
By Mark Dapin. Macmillan. 356pp. $32.99.
Reviewer: PETER PIERCE
Every other week, it seems, a fine new Australian novel is published. Few, however, can equal the vernacular flair, the originality of treatment of matters that we had thought overly familiar and the narrative drive of Mark Dapin's Spirit House, the second volume of his projected trilogy, The Streets of Sydney. The first instalment was King of the Cross. Dapin's weekend job is as a columnist for the Fairfax broadsheets, the latest of which dealt hilariously, but no doubt appositely, with his trying to find a literary agent in the United States.
Thirteen-year-old David has been packed off by selfish and separated parents to live in Bondi with his grandparents, Isaac ''Jimmy'' Rubens and his put-upon wife, Frida. ''Mum chose the Dark Man over me,'' as David sees it, and went to live in Redfern. His father has taken up with a dental nurse whom David scornfully calls the Woman in White. All Australian Jewish families, it appears, can be unhappy in their own ways. Most afflicted of all is Jimmy, former prisoner of war on the Burma railroad cum cabinet maker. His latest project, in which he enlists the help of his grandson, is to build a spirit house in the yard to give shelter to the unaccommodated ghosts of the fallen.Jimmy is one of those who ''knew the kind of people you didn't notice, men who sat all day in booths and kiosks, or rollered the oval, or ticketed cars''. His solace away from a home that all his children have left (including Deborah Who Lives in Israel) is the company of his drinking mates and verbal sparring partners - Solomon Solomon the tailor, Myer the optician and Ernie Katz, fellow POW and one of the official war artists who had won the Archibald Prize in the 1930s. Jimmy and Sollykatzanmyer meet at the RSL Club and the Thai Dee Town restaurant in Botany Road, where their badinage is infused with melancholy remembrance of the lost.Jimmy finally begins to tell his war stories to David, his grandson, prompted by intimations of his own end. Although it is only part of the richly arrayed material in Spirit House, it is one of the finest narratives of Singapore, Changi, the railway, of near starvation and brutality inflicted by Japanese and Koreans, of mean-minded viciousness from supposed comrades. As Jimmy enlists with the man who did not live to be his brother-in-law, the authorities have to scrounge an Old Testament for their oath of allegiance. There are not many Jews with them in the Second AIF, but plenty of ''blokes who'd been on and off the swag since 1929'', ''hard men from the bush who'd been starved off the land''.There are reminiscences of Chinese Frank, organiser of the communist All Chinese Union of Rickshawmen, of arts that apparently did not flourish in prison - ''Christ, there were some shithouse poets in Changi ... And there was a yodelling cowboy''. Besides Allied prisoners, there were hundreds of thousands of Asian forced labourers on the line - ''Tamils, Burmese, Malays and Chinese - chattering like monkeys, dying like roos in a cull''. The special care of the enlisted men, as Jimmy bitterly remembers, is for their pampered officers: ''They were like our children.'' This is his grieving summary of what happened among those who effectively had been conned to work on the railway: ''Everywhere I went, men died. It was like our time on earth was ending and we were leaving one by one.''Spirit House also provides many unusual angles on the Jewish community (some of them survivors of far worse slaughter) in Australia. There is ''Mr Sin, the King of the Cross, Jake 'The Take' Mendoza''; the frummers, who believe that the return of the Messiah is at hand and who, in their processions to shule, resemble ''gangs of science teachers who've been told to dress up for the school formal''. Dapin is funny, poignant, vibrantly witty and his novel is a treat from its elegiac opening to its bitter, unexpected close.
Peter Pierce is editor of The Cambridge History of Australian Literature.