The Wild, Funny, and Unmissable OzLit Debut

You know how sometimes you’re reading a book and it’s good, but you are left wanting because it refuses to go as far as you need it to, to feel satisfied? Nock Loose is nothing like that. Nock Loose goes as far as you want it to, and sometimes even further. Patrick Marlborough’s debut novel is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Described as a ‘screwball comedy revenge thriller’, reading Nock Loose felt like a fever dream in the best possible way. Rich world-building, nuance, slapstick humour and heartwarming characters, Patrick has created something extraordinary and unique in OzLit. I spoke to Patrick about their inspiration for Nock Loose, their writing process and how to get (and keep) boys and men reading.

Congratulations on the release of Nock Loose. A lot of people would be tangentially familiar with your work, but can you tell us a little about the journey to publication for Nock Loose, your debut novel?

I think the rough idea of what became in Nock Loose popped into my head in 2017, alongside a few of my other books. I wanted to write a straight revenge thriller in the style of Death Wish, etc, starring Magda Szubanski. I couldn’t keep it very straight for long, but – Agincourt sprang to life as soon as I began writing it in earnest. My writing is based around improvisation: I wrote the first draft in 10 days. That was shortlisted for the Fogarty. Although the editing only took a couple of months, it took 2 years to come out because Australian publishing works at a snail’s pace, haha, which is hellish for someone like me with chronic Sonic the Hedgehog syndrome.

Something I really enjoyed about it, was that the absolutely batsh*t crazy plot was anchored by characters I felt I really knew and had (mostly) warmed to by the end. Did you set out to create such sympathetic characters, or did their development surprise you as you wrote?

Characters have always been the most important element of my fiction, and I think that is because my characters are very much alive to me. They arrive fully formed, chatting away at me and correcting me if I write them saying or doing something which they see as out of character (so to speak). Conway is a good example: in my original conception, he was much more abusive than he is in the finished novel — a conman and a bullshit artist, he quite literally charmed me over to his side, and he ended up much more sympathetic than he would (or should?) have been (who knows, maybe he bamboozled me).

I am terribly bad at being mean to my characters, which is maybe why I have to write such cartoonishly foul villains so that I don’t feel bad about dropping a mace on their heads. Because all my unpublished works share their reality/history (what I call ‘The Munterverse’), a lot of characters cameo in other books — even Callum was given a major role in my latest novel, set in 2002, where he is still a rotten little rich boy, but one with the remnants of a child’s innocence, kinda.

So yeah, they lead me about by the nose!

Nock Loose is unlike anything I’ve ever read. By far, the most fun I’ve had reading adult fiction in a long time. Who are your influences? What should people read if they also loved Nock Loose?

It is hard to capsule my influences because they are so diverse and so many, but I’ll stick to writers: James Joyce is my #1 influence, which might surprise Nock Loose readers, but he gave me a lifelong love of language and tangents and oddball characters I’ll never shake. Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods also loom large for me — she takes satire to a cold and logical extreme that I’m always enthralled by. Similarly, Paul Beatty, who I had the pleasure of spending a couple of days with that weekend I first thought up Nock Loose, is a king of what I consider “literary cartoons” – injecting a Looney Tunes logic into otherwise grounded literary fiction. I think the biggest literary influence on Nock Loose is probably Robert Coover, a favourite writer of mine, whose books I devour religiously. His novel The Universal Baseball Association Inc., in which a man’s hyper-detailed and meticulously realised metafictional/historical baseball league attains something close to sentience, is a huge influence on the parallel fictions of Nock Loose. In the book’s acknowledgements, I also tip my hat to Taiyo Matsumoto, whose manga is so wildly imaginative and inventive, and always reignites the sense of play and limitless possibility in all my works.

I could answer this question for ever (and am doing so on my substack soon) – I am a mad consumer of literature, cinema, television, history, manga, anime, cartoons, video games, and music – an absolute geek for all of it, and more – so all my work takes on a sorta kaleidoscopic quality that I understand can feel overwhelming for others, but is quite a natural state of montage/collage interconnected jenga tower of fun and references etc for me, I just want to bring folks along for the ride.

We know that reading rates are perilously low here in Australia, particularly among men. What do you think we are missing in Australian publishing that could get boys and men reading again?

I think the main thing missing from this discourse, whenever I see it going around, is class. People are more time-poor than ever. Books are expensive, both financially and in terms of a very certain type of time and labour. We live in a system that not only devalues that, but it actively seeks to destroy it. Young men, boys, everyone, are currently barraged by a panopticon of hellish distractions and mind-melting slop that is custom-built to operate like a soothing balm at the end of another hellish day in the terminal end of our late capitalist hell — I can’t blame anyone for being too exhausted to read, honestly.

That said, I think Australian publishing largely puts out deeply mediocre dreck that is not worth the ink spent on it or the shelf space it occupies. Another part of this reality is that we are boring everyone with doggedly middle-brow forgettable pap that isn’t intelligent or interesting enough to justify the painfully dull experience of reading it. A good solution would be to burn all the major Australian publishers to the ground, redistribute their wealth, and start over. The secret sauce to getting people to read again is to write and publish good books.

I’ve seen Nock Loose described fondly by readers as ‘Tolkien for bogans’. As I was reading, I kept thinking about how tricky it would be to pitch this story to publishers. What’s your elevator pitch?

Publishers absolutely hate to see my autistic-ass coming. I was saying “Game of Thrones x Wake in Fright x Kill Bill x The Simpsons” and those dopey old dogs were looking at me like “huh?”. I basically tricked my publisher: they shortlisted me twice in a row for a major manuscript award, went back on publishing my first manuscript (a better book, but too formally adventurous for OzLit), so I kinda had to publish this one. I sent the manuscript to all the major pubs in the meantime, and they told me to take a hike, as always. Australian publishing is spooked senseless by original ideas. I consider myself the Saul Goodman of OzLit and have kinda accepted the fact that I’m going to have to keep conning and grifting these rubes until they award me Tim Winton’s ponytail. Until then, I’ll keep doing my Music Man routine until they realise that people like books that are 1) original, 2) smart, 3) funny. You wouldn’t think it, but that takes some convincing. (I love ‘Tolkien for bogans’ – thank you whoever said that, haha!)