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.

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

An Alien Writes

Here is Kerri Sackville's post about Spirit House. Judge for yourself whether she is from the planet Zog:
http://lifeandothercrises.blogspot.com/2011/09/relieved-post.html