Patrick Marlborough takes the familiar Australian small-town novel, gives it a medieval weapon, several litres of cider and a fairly serious head injury.

Joy is a retired Olympic archer and former stunt performer who returns to Bodkins Point, a Western Australian town whose civic life revolves around Agincourt: an annual, wildly violent medieval re-enactment that has been running for generations. After a fire kills Joy’s granddaughter, the festival becomes the stage for revenge. Naturally.

However, Marlborough uses the resulting chaos to dig into something not often dug in contemporary Australian literature. That is, mythmaking, colonial violence, masculinity, regional identity and the relentless, national habit of turning brutality into folklore. 

The novel is excessive, that's half the pleasure of its skill. The other half being that the fictional traditions accumulate until Bodkins Point feels less and less mythic, than totally and horribly plausible. Marlborough has described the book as a reaction against the humourlessness and familiar machinery of contemporary Australian literary fiction, and that antagonism gives the book much of its energy. Beneath the jokes, though, is a vicious and salient argument about what happens when a community keeps reenacting its past rather than examining it. 

Grab thee axe and swing.

Fremantle Press, North Fremantle, 2025. First edition. Paperback. Very light shelf wear only; internally clean and unmarked, binding firm. Near fine condition.