Courier Mail
Saturday 15th of October 2011
SPIRIT HOUSE
Mark Dapin
Pan Macmillan, $32.99
EVERY now and then you can run across a writer who does a little magic. They take something that almost everyone thinks they know something about, re-examine it from a completely unexpected direction and present the reader with a whole new take on their expectations.
David is 13 and finds himself in an unusual situation. His parents have split up and have taken up with new partners, leaving little room for David. He is sent to live with his 70-year-old Jewish grandfather in North Bondi. This is both liberating and horrifying, as his grandfather Jimmy is possibly a quite crazy old man.
But as Jimmy takes David around with him to the RSL and other haunts, the boy meets Jimmy's cronies Solomon, Katz and Myer. All four are still living with the horrendous events which defined their lives as survivors of Changi PoW camp and the Burma Railway in World War II. David is gradually drawn into their world and he comes to understand his grandfather more as he helps him to build a spirit house to quieten the ghosts of the past that still torment him.
The idea of using Jewish ex-PoWs to retell one of the formative Australian experiences of World War II is wonderful. The abundant conversations are liberally peppered with Yiddish expressions and Jewish attitudes. None of the former is explained at all and it is left to the reader to work out by context, and many of the latter are informed by a particular sense of humour.
Mark Dapin has pulled off a deeply human, but particularly Australian, bit of magic.
Sunday Tasmanian
Sunday 16th of October 2011
Beyond the battleground
PAUL MALARSKI
Spirit House by Mark Dapin
Macmillan, $32.99
SYDNEY newspaper columnist Mark Dapin may have earned a reputation for irreverent lad-lit, but in his second novel, Spirit House, he shows he is also a terrific storyteller.
Set in Bondi in the early 1990s, Spirit House is a superb piece of reflective war fiction detailing the lifelong emotional toll exacted on a World War II prisoner trapped for three years in the brutal Changi Prison Camp and his days working on the Thai-Burma Railway.
Jimmy Ruebens is a 70-year-old cantankerous Jewish-Australian Changi survivor who has spent much of the past 45 years trying to deal with the humiliation of Australia's meek surrender in Singapore and his internment in Changi.
His life since has centred on his invaluable support base three close war mates Solomon, Katz and Myer, better known as the Three Stooges and their regular drinking sessions at the local RSL. Jimmy is a deeply troubled man who has never come to terms with his humiliation and sense of shame at Australia's capitulation to the Japanese.
He is incapable of opening up to anyone until his 13-year-old grandson David arrives to stay after being palmed off by his mother, who wants time alone with her new boyfriend.
With David around, Jimmy can finally shrug off his repressed emotions and bitterness.
Together, the unlikely partners build a traditional Thai spirit house to protect the spirits of his long-lost friends. As David earns his grandfather's trust, Jimmy is able to lay his demons to rest.
Dapin mixes an endearing tale of love, loss and courage under unthinkable conditions with a fascinating array of characters, such as Quilpie, Bathurst Billy, Diamond Tom and the prison-camp colossus Townsville Jack.
He skilfully balances the tales of horror with gunshot humour through the interaction of Solomon, Katz and Myer, whose constant barbs and wit cleverly diffuse the horrific tales of prison life.
Everything and everyone is fair game for the quartet, except the one thing that binds them.
When Jimmy finally breaks his silence on Changi, Katz retorts: ``He hasn't spoken about the war for 45 years and he wants to raise it now at the dinner table, and as far as I am concerned he's not even pissed.''
But as Jimmy is only too willing to admit: ``During the worst times there's only two things that keep you going your mates and your sense of humour.''
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