We live in the golden age of slop. Why read a book when an oligarch’s app can hallucinate a summary for you? Why publish a book incongruent with AI-generated analysis of Nielsen BookScan data when you can simply print out a true crime podcast?

Notwithstanding so-called job providers, prisons, weapons manufacturers, real estate and fossil fuel entities, you would be hard-pressed to find a commercial industry more loathsome than Australian publishing — except maybe Buy Now, Pay Later lenders, Tasmanian salmon farming or those consulting firms that teach empathy to politicians through a million-dollar PowerPoint presentation. Establishment Australian publishing is a giftware industry. Dare it be said, most books are published not to attract readers but to appeal to gift buyers. Literary fiction, especially, has been reduced by commercial conservatism to the remit of what makes a good “gift idea”, rather than what makes for vibrant and interesting storytelling.

I used to eschew usage of the term “OzLit” for indiscernible, seemingly irrational reasons, but have come to embrace it since whenever I see the term written it invokes Oz from the Wizard of Oz: the literary world-building for which the author drew on the settler-colony around him. L Frank Baum’s Emerald City is based on Chicago. There is also a Bunbury in Oz and in Australia, although the former is a place where people are made of bread products — “buns” as it were.

OzLit, as an industry, similarly reflects whatever is going on in the popular upstairs paddock of the bourgeois settler collective consciousness.

This is of course a generalisation. The (very, very) small ecosystem of independent publishers (that haven’t been absorbed by the multinational corporate giftware slop machine) produce great literary works every year and do so on the fumes of a slowly melting MacBook Air battery.

This is all to say, Patrick Marlborough’s Nock Loose (Fremantle Press) is a rare gem of literary fiction: riotously entertaining, funny (like Joyce is funny, not like a coffee table book about some wacky element of Australiana is humourous) and layered. It induces thought, generative anxiety even. Nock Loose is radically silly, and it is the novel’s radical silliness that had me writing notes like “Finally, Western Australian realism” and “It is easier to imagine the next extinction event than it is the end of the imperial petrostate.” Your money or your life!

The elevator synopsis before I get too carried away: set in the year 2023, Nock Loose is propelled by the grief-stalked, 66-year-old Joy Robyn, a virtuosic archer, former Olympian and stunt performer from Bodkins Point. This small town south of Perth, not far from Balingup, was established on stolen Noongar Boodjar in the nineteenth century by the Bodkin family patriarch and British mercenary, Captain Bodkin. It conducts an annual medieval festival dubbed Agincourt, and 2023 is a “Blood Year”. Not long before the gore of Agincourt ‘23 is due to kick off, Joy loses her granddaughter and property in a mysterious arson and moves in with the Morgans. Jeb Morgan, a Noongar man, is an internationally renowned artist and huge manga and anime fan. What follows is not only Joy’s contemplation of her life, especially her relationship with her late father, Conway, but the town’s own violent colonial history culminating in a localised reckoning, a revolution of sorts (or at least what might be construed as a “practice” revolution; a revolutionary dress rehearsal).

The festival and the town itself are ruled over by a quasi-king, a descendant of Captain Bodkin. The Bodkins have derived power in the lineage of a very “Australian” tradition: genocidal massacre, settlement, extract/steal resources to furnish commodities (land, apples, cider, the recipe for a horrible but popular energy drink called Munter). Marlborough knowingly dispenses an examination of colonial-capitalism as an ongoing, shapeshifting event that is not told but embodied by their absurdist rendering of an almost-Biblical ensemble of characters. What this absurdism deftly does is surface the grotesque nature of colonialism that replicates itself behind a cumulative, intergenerational settler self-deception — a fictive overlay.

Nock Loose’s narrator gestures at this settler phenomenon when describing Agincourt: a fictionalised, ahistorical festival central to the social identity of the Bodkinites — a cultural formation borne of a settlement with a name just as fictive as the medieval festival it holds. Nock Loose is like a boganised Mystery Train (Jim Jarmusch, 1989) meets King of the Hill meets a literary preoccupation with the superimposition of settler hierarchies onto stolen land and Aboriginal civilisation. Having in recent years witnessed Marlborough’s comedy shows Killing Rove and Bad Boy Buckley, it can safely be said Nock Loose is the novelisation of Marlborough’s literary sensibilities and preoccupations: eviscerating storytelling that is blisteringly fun, unafraid, and blow-after-blow takedowns of what could be called Australianism. Nock Loose, like Bad Boy Buckley and Killing Rove (or any satire worth its salt for that matter) is a ledger of indictments.

The generative effect of this ledger, as it is unspooled, propels the narrative along with the topics it wrestles, and leaves the reader not so much thinking about what might happen next but pondering how it is that such a hyper-real world is genuinely reflective and interrogative of real life “Australia”.

The novel distills the very real and very noisy culture of silence that has long shaped settler culture across the federated colonies. In order to be silent to colonial atrocity, past and present, settler society makes as much noise as possible, especially through mythological havoc. Narrative noise. The noise of genre and trope. In this sense, Agincourt could be read as a microcosm of the settler tradition of carnivals of carnage and indeed “reenactments”. I remember as a kid in the mid-1990s when “Australia Day” suddenly became a thing. Mum took us to one such event where a man had been hired by organisers to roleplay as Captain Cook and dispense lollybags to children. Instead, the actor attended dressed as Captain Hook from the film Hook (Steven Spielberg, 1991), a Peter Pan blockbuster released a few years earlier. The ventriloquy was of course all the way wrong, even by “Australia/Oz” standards, but anything else would have been a ventriloquy, too, only more congruent with settler cultural utility. Also, nobody seemed to care. And for a period, children from the northern Central Coast believed Captain Cook had had a hook for a hand and the Union Jack was also the flag of Neverneverland.

Similarly, at the time of writing, fifty per cent of my grandads were from Perth. I’m no mathematician, but that is at least half of all my biological grandads (the number muddies when step-grandads are released into the statistical mix). Yes, Patrick Marlborough’s Nock Loose is not “realistic” in the “realism” sense, but it is a precise read of the strata of “Australian” characters — Australianisms — that do exist in large segments of the population (not necessarily all from the West Coast, but nonetheless). My Perth grandad, for example, could well have been the Alistair Langdon or the trickster, grifter and gifted bullshit artist, Conway Robyn (Joy’s dad) of Nock Loose (truly an abominable man, my estranged grandad was described by my nan as a “con artist” with a silver tongue).

Early in the novel, we learn Langdon donated a hankyū — a traditional Japanese short bow he had obtained during the war — to the organisers of Agincourt. Six-year-old Joy wins the hankyū and it changes the course of her life, Agincourt, Japanese television, and Bodkins Point. Similarly, my con artist grandad is known to the family rumour mill as having returned from battle against fascists in World War II in possession of a Japanese sword (I feel as though this racist, orientalist self-mythologising is actually quite widespread amongst white Australians). A quick search of his military record of course reveals that he never saw action, was often sanctioned for his insolence, foul mouth and going awol, and likely never pillaged a sword (which would have been a war crime, but it is, indeed, very much an Australianism to brag about having committed war crimes). This is not to say such characters are borne specifically of Perth, but rather of a specific strain of Australian colonialism. I’m not sure if my con artist grandad ever did own a sword of any kind — I was raised to believe he had died from alcoholic liver failure (he used to drink cologne when my grandma cut him off) during my mum’s childhood. I was in my late twenties when I learned he had been very much alive at the same time as me but was estranged on account of his awfulness; if he had owned any sword, it was probably a machete he had traded for a lawn mower at Cash Converters in 1983 or something.

So much of Australian culture is about self-mythologising things that didn’t happen to create the noise required of a culture that wishes to drown out the din of history and colonial atrocity. The havoc and violence of Nock Loose is not mere action for action’s sake — it is a sublime distillation of the grotesque contradictions that make up the colony’s noisy cultural regime. Nock Loose squarely punches up. Marlborough’s literary delivery is coherently anti-colonial and suitably incongruent, designed to whiplash any unsuspecting reader. It is in this whiplash and incongruence that Marlborough demonstrates how a postmodern mode of storytelling speaks to and through certain truths, navigating and negotiating the kind of terrain that realism tends to stumble over or go around. Realism is too often invested in the individual, warranting introspective examination in relation to interpersonal forces, usually immediate. Nock Loose, however, invokes external examination of (meta)historical forces that have produced an evolving and enduring culture, localised but connected to broader strokes of “Australian” culture. A collective culture sewn together by a patchwork of individuals, stories made of other stories, histories made of other histories, and “histories” made of mythologies and bootlegged pop culture properties.

Nock Loose dares to ask: is history historically accurate? And doubly dares to answer it with a melee that encourages participants to “make history!” Characters shift their motivations when they change “masks”. Every settler in the story is wearing a mask, of sorts, to hide something they do not wish to confront, and then they mask that mask with another mask, and another, either unaware, uninterested or unwilling to demarcate the line where their conceit ends and their “real” selves (elves?) begin. This is particularly apparent in the character of Rinds, a police officer who, without giving too much away, doubles down on his own self-delusion, self-deception, after the King abdicates and Jeb reveals his new artwork at Agincourt. A constant violence in Nock Loose is the tension between history, lore and branding (both corporate and familial, sometimes both are the same thing), the tension between historian, loremaster and PR. In the chapter “The Pirate Queen”, when Joy says to Ginny, “You know your history …,” she retorts: “Fuck, who doesn’t? All any cunt goes on about round these parts. Made-up history of their made-up game, y’know?”

To wax academic a moment, I think all historical writing involves a quotient of fictive overlay, and Marlborough writes from that corner. Nock Loose, like a poster depicting every single Simpsons character in an “ensemble shot”, is cognisant of the assemblage work required of history writing and the narrative motivations with which histories are written in the Australian settler-colony.

Concept production in academic historical writing presents numerous examples in which a fictive mode has been imposed upon observed phenomena to create meaning for the settler-reader and utility for the settler-historian. The characters in Nock Loose — and this is particularly true of the Bodkin kings — are motivated by creating historical narratives that not only service their own capital but render utility for the loremaster and corporate branding. So totalising is the lore generated by the lineage of Bodkins that it elicits participation from and includes mythology produced by the kingdom’s subjects. Rampant self-mythologising is a concession given to the citizenry by the nobility at Agincourt. Nock Loose teaches, through the allegorical device it lends as an organisational frame of reality, how this concession bolsters the culture of noise required to obscure the gruesome reality of colonialism. Truly an Australian phenomenon if there ever was one.

Marlborough elucidates these colonial reflections and refractions in granular world-building detail from the get-go. The colonial placename “Bodkins Point” appears without its original possessive apostrophe like many colonial Australian placenames. Deleted for ease of publication, the retiring of the Saxon genitive disremembers the colonial thief: the linguistic normalisation of white possession (colonialism) and Aboriginal dispossession (genocide). Sans the possessive apostrophe, the place name becomes pluralised, the people become Bodkinites, and it is instead they who inherit the stolen land and the thief’s (the Captain King’s) blood-soaked traditions.

One of the things I most enjoyed about Nock Loose is the warmth and affection rendered between protagonists, even when they are driving one another up the absolute wall. Another is Marlborough’s skillful and smooth ability to take the reader between the past and present. I use “tapestry” not as a throwaway descriptor to characterise Nock Loose. The novel’s narrative is woven tapestry-like, propulsive and compelling and in sagas, but if you stop to look there are about as many (if not more?) easter eggs as the Bayeux Tapestry has (barely) hidden dicks. Although, if The Guardian is to be believed, “Two Bayeux scholars [are] at loggerheads over whether dangling shape depicts dagger or the embroidery’s 94th phallus” and “Historians dispute Bayeux tapestry penis tally after lengthy debate”. I mention this as evidence of a very Marlboroughesque comedy unfolding not in the fictional Bodkins Point or in the metafictional world of Agincourt (although it would be very much at home there), but as an example of the real life (medieval) well of absurdism from which the author draws water (and arrows) to skewer manifold Australianisms.

Commercial publishers love it when you pitch your book as being like three other books that “do well” on Nielsen BookScan, and so three books like Nock Loose: The King James Bible, Bandicoot Burial, and The Barefoot Investor II: First Fleet Feet Pics.

OzLit needs a brain scan, not Nielsen BookScan. And here it is. Nock Loose is without the usual timid afflictions that course through too many major-published novels in Australia that cater to the ontologically bourgeois. It is a disquieting confrontation, a danger to bourgeois-settler conceptions of story. Your money or your life! Finally, Western Australian realism. Realism as in the only realistic mode of echoing real life “Australianness” is refracting it through the grotesquerie of absurdist post-postmodernism and a “high-fantasy-medievalish” festival powered by cider, violence, mythology and a blood-covered tapestry of metahistories.

This is part of a series of critical essays supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.