A mordant, flawed Australian slapstick chronicles a small town through its murderous medieval festival

One of the gorier fates meted out in Patrick Marlborough’s revenge comedy is allotted to an unnamed journalist, a minor character who appears in only a single sentence. The journalist arrives at his untimely end after penning a profile of George Bodkin. Also known as “The Nutter King”, Bodkin is the third of five mad monarchs who reign year-round over the fictional small town of Bodkins Point.

Review: Nock Loose – Patrick Marlborough (Fremantle Press)

The Nutter King is irked by the piece, which implies he has flouted laws and human rights charters, so he has the journalist pulverised in a printing press. He then decants the poor hack’s pureed remains, selling them off at a school fete as strawberry jam.

His brutality is all the funnier if you’re aware of the parallels between the journalist’s investigative work and the author’s. The seed of Nock Loose was a short report on a medieval festival in the West Australian town of Balingup that Marlborough wrote for Vice in 2016. This makes the subtext of the journalist’s fate clear. Woe to those who fail to take the silliness of rural role-playing seriously.

Bodkins Point’s citizens are routinely wounded and killed during its ultraviolent annual medieval festival, Agincourt – the only thing the town is known for (apart from a brand of cider). The kings reign over the town year-round, as the time between Agincourts is essentially spent planning the next one.

‘This town runs on massacres’

Nock Loose, like much Australian fiction of the last 50 years, takes as its broad target the rapacious capitalist’s distaste for any inconvenient history. Callum Bodkin (“The Wanker King”) is the mouthpiece for this view: “this town runs on massacres”, he quips. For him, this is not a cause for regret or reflection on the genocidal violence that accompanied its establishment – but something to be grateful for, as a source of profit.

“Australia is a deeply humourless country with incredibly thin skin”, writes Marlborough in his author’s note. That thin skin, he continues,

is stretched tight over an atavistic ever-thrumming nastiness, itself the inevitable curdling of our violent colonial origins, the barbarousness of which is ongoing.

Nock Loose moves between critique on a national scale and entertaining little digs. They are peppered throughout the novel’s rather gnarly plot, in which larger-than-life caricatures joust for a place in the limelight.

At its core is Joy, a portly lesbian in her mid-60s, formerly a prodigious archer turned stunt double. She is best known for her role in a live-action adaptation of a fictional manga series, Sukeban Yumi, “a show as hyperactive as it was horny”. (In the acknowledgements, Marlborough wryly insists Joy must be played by Magda Szubanski if the novel is adapted into a film.)

Joy is aided in her quest to avenge the death of her granddaughter Hannah by a motley crew of eccentrics. These include local historian Casca, her artist and weeb (or anime/manga nerd) Noongar husband Jeb, their precocious daughter Ophelia, and the local smith Ron.

This unlikely fellowship’s long list of enemies includes a number of ghoulish deplorables. Often, these villains are rendered by sharp turns of phrase. There’s the quixotic Josef “Saint Joe” Panzer: “a little man, not unlike a strip of beef jerky”. There’s the unheroic Arthur Bodkin, “The King Apparently”, known to keep “his glass eye pickling in a pitcher of cider on the desk in his study”. And his slimy son Callum shares his father’s “casually lizard-like movement – not unlike a goanna ambling over a hot road”. The novel follows the murderous misdeeds of these and other creeps.

Nock Loose’s mordant humour gives the novel an edge. It lifts it out of the documentarian drudgery the prose occasionally slips into, when Marlborough’s penchant for Tolkienian world-building cleaves too closely to the fact-farming form of a Wikipedia page.

Another shortcoming is the novel’s dialogue. When its characters speak, they too often slip into interchangeable cliches, their statements littered with ellipses, capitalisations, “dunno” and “fukt”. After the umpteenth burlesque of crass philistinism, it starts to wear a tad thin.

At their worst, such characters become either straightforward embodiments of racist anti-intellectualism, or preachers to the converted. The aforementioned “Man of La Mandurah”, Saint Joe, ironically hates Catholics, but predictably detests them about as much as he does “Jews, queers, and blacks”. In case Marlborough’s point wasn’t clear, Joe’s gang – the Don Coyotes – wear a patch that spells out it out (via another allusion to Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote): their insignia is “a bloody windmill whose blades bent in the shape of a swastika”.

Barbs and brand identity

Nock Loose’s satirical barbs find their primary mark in a somewhat milquetoast critique of Callum Bodkin’s idea we ought to “worry less about our history, and more about our brand”. But one begins to wonder who exactly needs to be persuaded of this view. It’s hard to imagine many readers of playful literary fiction would think we need more profiteering and less knowledge of the past.

Nock Loose has less to say about gender than some other novels exploring the regressive fantasises behind historical reenactments. For example, Sarah Moss’ Ghost Wall, a tightly plotted novel about an academic reenactment of day-to-day life in the Iron Age, explores how such rituals frequently make a fetish of agrarian gender roles.

And for all its eccentric humour and wicked turns of phrase, Nock Loose’s reenactments also never quite attain the ethical stakes of Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, in which the reenactment of half-recalled memories becomes a way of investigating the limits of literary realism.

This may all be a result of Nock Loose’s reluctance to relinquish its commitment to other kinds of generic brand identity. Marlborough retains an understandable affection for the fantastical, slapstick and cartoonish – but in a way that makes it difficult for Nock Loose to move beyond such formulae.

Marlborough is hardly the first to try to elevate the trappings of genre: Ishmael Reed, Junot Diaz and Ling Ma have each, in very different ways, worked to wed literary ambitions to ostensibly generic forms. Nock Loose doesn’t quite manage to pull this balancing act off with the same aplomb. But Marlborough’s debut is nonetheless an impressive feat: a feral work of madcap ambition from a novelist well worth keeping an eye on.