R&R (Mark Dapin, Viking)
In Mark Dapin’s R&R, the author takes aim at a facet of war rarely portrayed in the countless novels on the subject. Set in Vung Tau during the occupation of Vietnam, Dapin eschews the usual genre tropes and focuses instead on a more insidious strain of violence: that born out of the boredom of an idle force. This novel is as much a noir thriller as it is about war, replete with a good cop, bad cop and sex workers with hearts of gold. It follows two military police partners investigating a gruesome attack, which is made all the more bizarre by the victim’s already being dead. In the background is the brothel owner who controls the town. It becomes apparent early on that the reader is unlikely to meet any female characters who aren’t sex workers, and while this serves to highlight the hyper-masculine military environment, there is an unsettling ambiguity as to whether it is an indictment or endorsement of it. The novel’s environment is meticulously recreated, often to the extent that it obfuscates the plot, and while Dapin writes well, he is over-reliant on metaphor: a man’s face is described as ‘like a turtle’s from its shell’, only to be reimagined ‘like a thwarted vulture’ in the next paragraph. Juggling more characters than War and Peace, the novel flits between countless points of view, often in the same paragraph, introducing each character via a lengthy backstory that causes them to blur into an indistinct mass. His leading men never rise above caricature: the cocky, crude American, and his virtuous Australian counterpart. Sitting somewhere between Matthew Reilly and Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, this novel has a clear mass-market appeal: a sort of L.A. Confidential set during the Vietnam War. Though its ambition exceeds its execution, it should sell well to adult males.
Myles McGuire is a freelance writer and bookseller at Riverbend Books in Brisbane
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Category: Reviews
