Couldn't Ask For A Better Review - From The Australian

MARK Dapin is best known as a columnist and feature writer for the Fairfax press, a role where making stuff up is called for only occasionally.
On the strength of his second novel, Spirit House, he should make the leap to full-time fiction. If this book is not on next year's literary prize lists I will be surprised.
Dapin's first novel, King of the Cross (2009) was a high-rent crime thriller: gritty, smart and funny but with a soggy patch towards the end. Some of its characters have supporting roles in Spirit House, but this is a much different and more ambitious book, one that cares about surprising things, such as love and beauty.
The story has its contemporary setting in Sydney's Bondi in the weeks around Anzac Day 1990 and is told mainly by two characters: Jimmy Reubens, a 70-year-old Jewish Australian survivor of the Changi prisoner-of-war camp and the Thai-Burma railway, and his 13-year-old grandson, David, who is sent to live with his grandparents when mum and dad split up.
Being a returned PoW is tough, especially when your captors were the Japanese, but so is being a teenager, and Dapin deftly balances what could otherwise be a one-sided relationship. It's never far from our minds that Jimmy and his mates were little more than boys when they went to war.
"This was very disappointing," David thinks of his grandfather early on. "It seemed Jimmy had spent most of the war surrendering, in prison or thinking about his [Chinese] girlfriend. No wonder he didn't like to talk about it."
But it is through David that we slowly learn Jimmy's terrible story, and even if you know your history, it is one that will make you rage and despair. Such is the power of the novelist.
As Jimmy and David hang out together, mainly at the local RSL with Jimmy's fellow survivors, Solomon, Katz and Myer, the old and troubled man begins to break a silence he has held for most of his life. And this confuses and angers his comrades.
"He hasn't spoken about the war for 45 f . . king years, and he wants to raise it now, at the dinner table . . . and, as far as I can tell, he's not even f . . king pissed," says Katz, a war artist who survived by drawing pornography for his jailers. "What exactly does Jimmy Reubens have to say that is suddenly so f . . king urgent?"
But this outburst represents the habit of a post-war lifetime for Sollykatzanmyer, as David thinks of the three old Jews. They have survived being survivors by never talking about the war, taking little seriously and endlessly ribbing each other, with sexual put-downs their stock-in-trade. As Dapin suggests at several points, this emotional retardation is rooted in the shame of surrender, of being "fighting men who've given up the fight". Their nightmares are of blood and guts and no glory.
Yet this nothingness is not what they feel, indeed it is a repression of what they feel, and when, awakened by David's innocently gung-ho questions, Jimmy decides to build the spirit house of the title, a miniature Thai temple to house the restless dead, for the first time in 45 years everyone stops pretending.
But before that, we must hear from the dead, and those who did not die but sometimes wished they had. Dapin's depictions of life in Changi and on the Thai-Burma railway are necessarily harrowing, and while he, a writer known for his humour, does allow some wisecracks and comedic set pieces such as prison camp frog races, we are never less that a dreadful distance from Hogan's Heroes.
You know by page 46 that we have moved past the Underbelly violence of King of the Cross, when Jimmy, in a confused state, punches his grandson "in the head so hard that I flew backwards off my chair. It felt like I'd been hit by a cricket bat."
The inhuman treatment of the PoWs is described in sickening detail, but it's in the quieter moments that Dapin goes to where it hurts most.
"I don't know what they did to him in there," Jimmys says of the day the "Japanese Gestapo, the Kempetai" visited a larrikin PoW in a windowless room: "I don't like to think about it. There are some things you can turn away from. It's all right not to look."
Or when Jimmy tells his grandson he didn't think things could get worse than Changi. That was "just a failure of the imagination, that's all".
Towering over the PoW sections of the book is a tall, tough prisoner called Townsville Jack, organiser of the aforementioned frog races. Townsville Jack is one of those blokes you just can't kill, or at least so any reader will hope. He is a character who could carry a book on his own.
Positive book reviews often come with minor quibbles but I want to avoid them here. I initially found the crude repartee of Sollykatzanmyer irritating, but I accept that Dapin, who is Jewish and whose grandfather was a war veteran, has known men like these.
This may not do Dapin's reputation as a newspaper humourist any favours, but Spirit House is a serious novel, and a fine one. Though they are very different personalities, there are obvious similarities between Dapin and Chris Womersley, author of The Low Road and Bereft. Both won a Ned Kelly Award for their first novel, both have written grander, emotionally complex second novels. Bereft was nominated for just about every local literary award this year, including the Miles Franklin, and I doubt the comparision will end with Spirit House.
Stephen Romei is The Australian's literary editor.

Spirit HouseBy Mark Dapin Macmillan Australia, 359pp, $32.99