North Melbourne Books October Newsletter - featuring Mark Dapin

In the October edition of the North Melbourne Books Newsletter we talk to British born, Australian author Mark Dapin about his extraordinary new novel, R & R. Set in the R & R town of Vung Tau during the Vietnam War, it's both comic and violent in equal measure. A truly gripping read, it's one of our favourite novels for this year.

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North Melbourne Books talks to Mark Dapin

North Melbourne Books: R&R is set in 1967, in the town of Vung Tau, which is miles away from the front line of the Vietnam War. The novel centres for the most part around the misdeeds and antics of three military men -  John “Nashville” Grant, an American military policeman, his ingenuous Australian partner “Shorty” and the violently unpredictable Sergeant TJ Caution. Where did the inspiration come from to write the story?

Mark Dapin: I thought of the plot while I was researching my military history book, The Nashos’ War (Penguin 2014). An Australian Vietnam vet told me that in Vung Tau in a storm, corpses would come out of the rainsoaked soil and float into town. R&R opens with a scene in which a disinterred dead body ends up in a bar, having a drink and a smoke, and is subsequently shot by a US police sergeant. A certain amount of debate ensues as to whether it is a crime to shoot someone who is already dead.

NMB: The novel is full of the type of black comedy that makes you laugh in spite of yourself. The scenes with the naive Shorty, who tries to make amends for his lack of sexual experience, are hilarious. Was it important to you to try and inject a lot of humour into the novel?

MD: Yeah, it’s supposed to be a funny book. I’ve been a bit baffled that, in some quarters, it has been taken for social realism. Corpses don’t really get taken into bars, see? On the other hand, it has seriously literary intent. It’s a book about moral choices.

NMB: Two of the main characters, Nashville and Sergeant TJ Caution, are confronting and violent. Psychologically they’d probably be described as borderline psychopaths. How did you get inside their heads to tell their story?

MD: Caution is a sociopath. Nashville is just somebody who’s good at violence and realises he enjoys it too much. I have met quite a few mad blokes who were good at violence. I’m interested in the way they justify themselves, which is also a concern of R&R.

NMB: R&R reads as a portrait of disturbed men in wartime trying to survive in a hostile foreign environment . What does the novel mean to you?

MD: Hopefully, it means a commercial breakthrough. My books are always very well reviewed, get nominated for awards etc, but they’re not exactly bestsellers. It’d be nice if this one was actually read.

NMB: What books are you enjoying reading at the moment?

MD: Nothing. I don’t really have time to read. But I enjoyed listening to extracts from the work of Ellen Van Neerven, Chris Flynn, Lian Hearn and the slam poet Zohab Zee Khan, when we toured country NSW together in August.

R & R, by Mark Dapin

Staff review by Chris Saliba

R & R, a war novel set in Vietnam, is both violent and comic. It often has the power to shock as it describes psychopathic males in wartime. Author Mark Dapin has achieved something brilliant and striking.

Mark Dapin’s new novel R & R opens with a scene that veers between the grotesque and the darkly comic. During heavy monsoon rain the coffin of a middle-aged Vietnamese man is dislodged from its burial place in the R & R town of Vung Tau and carried to a local bar that doubles as a brothel. Two drunk military personnel desecrate the corpse, treating it like a marionette doll. There’s clearly not one iota of respect for the local Vietnamese. The scene is like something out of Shakepeare’s Titus Andronicus, or fellow Elizabethan Christopher Marlowe’s revenge tragedy The Jew of Malta, as Dapin skillfully mixes farce and gratuitous violence. This is a literary motif  that continues throughout the novel.

R & R is set in 1967, in the town of Vung Tau, which is miles away from the front line of the Vietnam War. John ‘Nashville’ Grant is an American military policeman working in the town. His new partner, Shorty, is a somewhat idealistic and naive young man from Bendigo, Australia. He’s been nicknamed Shorty because he’s so tall. To say that Nashville is jaded is an understatement. He doesn’t seem to care for anything at all, besides getting laid by the local prostitutes and drinking. Nor is he particularly interested in his job. He confesses to having done no paperwork and is happy doing as little as possible. Shorty, by contrast, is conscientious, always trying to do the right thing, but he is yet to learn how the local politics actually works. He is often mocked by Nashville for being so wet behind the ears.

For both men, their main trouble is locating and dealing with a fellow colleague, the violent, even psychopathic Sergeant TJ Caution. He’s gone missing, and is responsible for all sorts of mayhem. In many ways, TJ Caution is the most compelling character of the whole novel. He is extremely violent and nihilistic, yet Dapin gives him an undeniably comic aspect. A smile involuntarily curls on your lips as you read some of his wittier dialogue, but you’re glad you’re nowhere near him. As mentioned above, a black, Marlovian humour, like something you’d see on the Elizabethan stage, permeates the novel.

R & R is a remarkable achievement. Writing a novel with several of the main characters being  basically psychopathic, yet imbuing them with humour, is no easy task to pull off. Dapin controls his narrative superbly, with the action often becoming quite explosive, yet never running off the rails. He also has a wide cast of wonderfully developed supporting characters that gives the story a richness and believability.

Often frightening and disturbing, R & R has the power to shock as it describes men’s violence and nihilism.

R & R, by Mark Dapin. Published by Viking. ISBN: 9780670078202 RRP: $32.99

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