ABC Book Show review

Chris Flynn

Sometimes we have a tendency to forget the breadth of talented writers we have in Australia. Take Fairfax columnist Mark Dapin for example, who is one of the country's most recognisable and consistently funny journalists. Those who enjoy his column's stylistic footnote-heavy quirks will have flocked to his unconventional first novel King of the Cross which rightly won 2010's Ned Kelly First Fiction Award. In it, a cadet reporter from the Australian Jewish Times interviews Jake Mendoza, legendary Sydney crime lord. The resulting memoir is a sly wink to real world gangland figures.

Mendoza pops up again as an enigmatic bit player in Dapin's second novel Spirit House which is frankly just wonderful. Why? It's funny, truthful, upsetting, moving and sheds a whole new light on an aspect of Australian war history that I thought had been amply covered a hundred times already, namely Changi prison in Singapore and the construction of the Thai Burmese railway by Allied prisoners.

Dapin's protagonist is Jimmy Rubens, a 70 year-old Jewish veteran living in 1990 Bondi. Jimmy's 13 year-old grandson David, who loves war stories, is staying with his grandparents after an acrimonious split between his parents. His mother has packed him off so she can spend some time with her new lover, which suits David to a degree as he gets to pick his grandfather's brain. Jimmy is the definition of surly and has been having a hard time dealing with his memories of fallen comrades. He takes David under his wing as a confidant, a kind of free therapist if you like, and so a harrowing tale unfolds.

This all sounds very serious but Dapin has shrewdly steered the book away from misery memoir territory. The scenes in Changi and Thailand are amazing when they come, desperately sad and frustrating but also imbued with a sense of the Australian soldiers as whip-smart, tough as nails, irreverent men making the best of a nightmare situation. Their use of humour as a coping mechanism makes for thrilling reading. Jimmy's best friends are Townsville Jack, a defiant man of mystery and Katz, a war artist.

They do whatever it takes to survive, organising frog races as lucrative morale boosters and drawing sex pictures for the Japanese guards in exchange for eggs. As the years roll by and their penury seems never ending, they are forced to watch men die from starvation, disease and violence whilst twitchy officers hang on to misguided military discipline in the midst of chaos. They joined up to fight and spent the war in a hellhole prison.

If Spirit House was just about Jimmy relating war tales to his grandson, it would be bleak stuff indeed. Fortunately Dapin gives the modern passages real life, as Jimmy drags David to the RSL where he drinks with three other Jewish veterans Solly, Myer and his old friend Katz. The banter between these old war dogs is unbelievable. The zingers just keep coming as they tear sarcastic strips off each other. It's the funniest book I've read in a long time, which, given the serious nature of the appalling conditions in Changi and on the railway, is a little odd. But it works. We need the humour as much as they seem to. It's what keeps these men from losing their minds, although Jimmy is well on the way. He's building a spirit house in the yard, after all, to house the ghosts that plague him. Initially bemused, the local community comes around to his project as Dapin leads us to a transcendent ending. There'll be a few reviewers singing Mark Dapin's praises over this one and I'm very happy to be one of them, for this is a beautiful, hilarious, frightening novel that has leapt straight into my top three for 2011.

Courier Mail, Sunday Tasmanian

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.''

An event

I am having an author "event" tomorrow night (Thursday 27 October) at 6pm at Dymocks Booskhop in Sydney. Details are on the homepage of my website www.markdapin.com.au.
Come along if you want. It shouldn't last more than 45 minutes.
Buy my book. Or someone else's. But not Andrew Bolt's.

Another very interesting roundabout