FREMANTLE author Patrick Marlborough says Australian publishers have spent years ignoring a generation of readers after his novel Nock Loose was shortlisted this week for the Small Publisher’s Adult Book of the Year category at the Australian Book Industry Awards.

The novel has already sold through its first print run and is now well into a third run.

Mr Marlborough said the response had vindicated his belief there was an audience for stranger, more experimental fiction in Australia.

“That’s the thing,” he said.

“Technically, it’s my fourth manuscript, and I’ve had two other shortlisted ones for big prizes, and it gets to the publisher and they just say that, ‘it’s not commercial enough’, or I get told that nobody’s doing this in Australia, so it doesn’t work.

“I know it will work, and I think it’s been proven to work.”

Mr Marlborough said Australian publishers had underestimated readers.

“I think Australian publishing has turned its back on a generation of readers and a certain type of reader that they’ve convinced themselves doesn’t exist, but it’s because they stopped writing books for them,” he said.

“We write so many books in Australia that I would describe as content, where they don’t last beyond six months and they’re just stocking filler stuff.

“When they released Nock Loose, they put it in the crime section.”

“I don’t understand why they did that.”

Postmodern

Mr Marlborough said his influences came less from mainstream Australian fiction than from postmodern American writers.

“The kind of ‘60s American writers like Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover, who’s a guy that nobody talks about, but he’s coming from that generation,” he said.

“But he’s a really big influence on my work, and particularly Nock Loose.

“That kind of fiction doesn’t really exist in Australia, like post modernism never really arrived here for whatever reason.”

“The closest we got to it, I think successfully, would be Peter Carey, maybe.”

Mr Marlborough said he had been writing bizarre stories since childhood.

“I’ve had a very particular style of writing since I was – not exaggerating to say – five or six years old when I started writing novels,” he said.

“I used to write a series of detective fictions about two leprechauns, one of them that was solving Princess Diana’s death.”

“I was a strange kid.”

He said he had long been fascinated by the idea of turning cartoon logic into literature.

“My biggest influence is James Joyce, who’s quite separate from them, but I write at the back of Nock Loose in the little essay that I’m interested in writing a literary cartoon,” he said.

“How to translate Bugs Bunny into literature is something that’s always kind of fascinated me.”

Nock Loose is set in WA’s South West, inspired in part by a visit to the Balingup Mediaeval Fair.

It follows Joy, a gifted archer and former stunt performer, as she returns to her chaotic home town of Bodkins Point after a devastating fire kills her granddaughter. 

Set against an ultra-violent mediaeval festival in WA’s South West, the novel mixes revenge, grief and absurd humour while exploring the town’s tangled history and strange traditions.

“The thing that inspired the book more than anything, was seeing blokes dressed in full armour, but wearing Speed Dealers and smoking vapes,” Mr Marlborough said.

“I was like, ‘That’s really funny, I want that anachronism.’”

He said the South West was ideal territory for the clash between fantasy, nerd culture and country life.

“I like the tension of the intersection between nerds and country Australia.

“I remember being in York, I think at some writer’s thing, and I went to an op shop, and there was a box set of Yu-Gi-Oh manga.”

“I was thinking, ‘What’s it like to be a hardcore weeb in a country town, it must be very strange’.”

The book also delves into the fictional town’s history as the site of a colonial massacre, and while Marlborough said he never intended that aspect to be delivered humorously, he says it does critique Australian authors who leverage Indigenous trauma in their fiction.

“It’s a real trend, particularly the moment that they write about Aboriginal ways of knowing and history from what’s meant to be a de-colonised perspective.

“But it mainly can’t be, and almost the more effort you put into that, the more it complicates it.” 

Mr Marlborough said the critical response to Nock Loose had been overwhelming.

“The critical response has been like a dream,” he said.

“I have some of my favourite writers in Australia, and literary critics, comparing me to James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon.

“So on that level, it’s really been like a dream come true.”

by STEVE GRANT