PATRICK MARLBOROUGH is a neurodivergent nonbinary writer, comedian, journalist, critic and musician based in Walyalup (Fremantle, Western Australia).
Their book, Nock Loose, is touted as a ‘screwball comedy revenge thriller, Game of Thrones meets Wake in Fright meets Kill Bill meets The Simpsons.
Read on for a Q&A with the author.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Bodkins Point is a tiny town with a big secret and an annual, screwball medieval festival. And Agincourt will make you a hero if it doesn’t kill you.
And this year’s festival is more dangerous than ever. If the mock battles don’t get you killed and there are no bushfires on the horizon, you still have to watch you don’t fall prey to a vengeful former-Olympic archer and stuntwoman.
Because Joy Robyn, is on a quest is about to use Agincourt as her platform for vengeance after her granddaughter is killed in a bushfire started by someone in the town.
MEET PATRICK MARLBOROUGH
Where did the idea of Agincourt come from?
In 2016, I attended the Balingup Medieval Festival. I was covering it for Vice. I was struck by the comical anachronisms, specifically the mashup of medieval, nerd, and small bush-town culture. I took a lot of photos highlighting these ironic juxtapositions: guys in plate armour with Monster Energy caps smoking darts, knights wearing speed dealers, washer women playing games on their iPads. Yet when I began thinking about what became Nock Loose, I really just had ‘revenge thriller starring Magda Szubanski set in a (normal enough) medieval festival in the bush’.
All my novels are ‘improvised’ but. Agincourt came to me as I was writing the first chapter, which was when I realised I was incapable of writing anything other than a piss-take. With that in mind, Agincourt is really a satire of Australian mythmaking – how we retell our colonial past to fit a very banal, in my eyes very mediocre, present.
Is it the characters or the festival itself that you used to drive the story?
It is hard for me to discuss my process without giving away the game. The version you’re reading is a much tidier, more ‘consistent,’ plot holes filled-in (kinda, hopefully, haha) version of the first draft—but otherwise what’s there is what was there in that first Fogarty shortlisted run. I wrote (that version of) Nock Loose in 2 weeks, writing 12–14 hours a day in a little studio. I plan no characters, plot, setting, dialogue, or theme. They just appear to me as naturally as the mug of tea I’m looking at now. That said, I think my characters manipulate me.
Take Conway for instance: in my first conception, he was a much more loathsome, unforgivable, abusive bastard. But he got to chatting to me, and convinced me otherwise – he is a rake and a charmer and yes, a dud, but ultimately, he’s trying. Arthur, too, was originally the book’s Big Bad. But I found his dry wit so enticing that he slowly became its secret hero. Pucker Puck began as a throwaway gag, then became the key to unlocking the book’s secrets. These people all arrived fully formed – if they change in the writing it’s because they correct my initial perceptions of them. There’s too many examples of this in Nock Loose to list.
In a lot of ways, The Captain took the book from me. He appeared as soon as I began writing about what Agincourt ‘was’, exactly. His stupid sets the tone …
In terms of the festival, it allowed me structure to do what I love best: create meta-histories and parallel fictions. It’s a joke vehicle, and an alt-universe builder. The key to Agincourt – a trap I laid for nitpicking nerds and pedants, really – is that it’s inconsistent. Even the people who live and breathe it can’t really settle on the ‘rules’, or its origins, or what it means exactly. Remind you of anywhere?
Which character did you enjoy writing most?
Ultimately, Conway. I love a liar. I love a deadbeat. I love a grifter who never learns his lesson – someone who cannot help themselves. There is too much of my worst self in Conway, but his energy, his language, his duality – I have bipolar, so make of that what you will – is all very fun to try to get a hold on. As I said above, the book dictates me, not the other way around. Conway literally led me by the nose down a version of his story that maybe isn’t even true – who am I to say?
But! I loved writing Arthur also, because it’s always fun to write a straight man. He is the only Bodkinite who sees Agincourt in its awful totality, yet his cynicism and indifference (at least his performance of it) ultimately binds him to it. He is very loosely based on Paul Keating’s appearances on The 7.30 Report in the 2000s, where he loved to bitch about everything and everyone, while still being a fool for the system that doomed him.
But! If I’m being totally honest, my favourite characters to write in Nock Loose were the Bodkinites themselves. Having the town operate as a ping-ponging chorus of whiney psychos was/is very fun. They bring the world to life, maybe begrudgingly, but it’s all they know how to do.
That said! I love the twins. They arrived very whole and organically. Constable Rinds was originally a villain, but he won me over by being a dag. The Panzers/Coyotes felt like they’d already existed, and do appear in my other novels. Big Ron – who seems to be everyone’s favourite – is heavily based on a man who has been our family friend for literally 75 years; he is a loving tribute to him.
I am a huge nerd for minor characters in fiction (Stubb in Moby Dick, Simon (Stephen’s father) Daedalus in Ulysses, Gamling). The texts (especially Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire) that Nock Loose is drawing from/satirising are full of them, so this book is too. Woody Barr and Bill Chuffed (can you tell I was raised in a household where Ben Chiffley is considered a minor deity?) are good examples.
Pucker Puck (PUCKER PUCK!) is me in 40 years, sadly.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE AUTHORPatrick Marlborough has been published in VICE, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, Junkee, Noisey, Meanjin, Overland, Crikey, The Lifted Brow, Cordite, Going Down Swinging, The Betoota Advocate, and beloved other. They are a passionate mental health and disability advocate, regularly writing about their experiences with depression, suicide, bipolar, high functioning autism, and OCD.
They have lived their whole life in Fremantle and spend their days arguing with their incredibly naughty dog, Buckley.
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