Author Trent Dalton on how success can be ‘deeply unsettling’
How do you follow up penning the nation’s fastest selling debut novel on record? If you are bestselling Brisbane author Trent Dalton, who wrote the bewitching Boy Swallows Universe, you look to the skies.
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Somewhere in writer Trent Dalton’s pinball machine of a mind, that technicolour maze where ideas explode like silver balls from flippers, ricocheting off bumpers and disappearing down rabbit holes in all those glowing lights, lies the quietest of corners.
It is here where Dalton’s silver balls of ideas come to rest, and all of them, no matter the dizzying journey they have taken to get there, can be summed up in one word, legacy.
It was legacy at the heart of Dalton’s phenomenally successful 2018 debut novel Boy Swallows Universe (500,000 copies sold in Australia and counting; 38 international editions and counting; the fastest-selling Australian debut on record) and it is legacy also at the core of his new book, All Our Shimmering Skies.
“Every word I write comes from the same place,” Dalton, 41, says in his home office in Brisbane’s west, where the shelves speak of his own particular legacy (concert ticket stubs from his first date with his wife Fiona, his grandfather’s cigarette card album, all the books that have left their mark on him).
“It all comes from my own past, the stuff I carry with me, the rocks I carry around – the rocks we all carry around.
“And you know, I thought foolishly that if I put all those rocks in the pages of Boy Swallows Universe that I would be done with them. But of course, here we are two years later and it’s all still there, the weight of it and I’ve realised that you don’t need to shed legacy, you just have to accept it, to say: “Hey I’m carrying all these rocks around – and so are you.
“Together,” Dalton grins, “we are a whole damn quarry.”
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Boy Swallows Universe in part mined Dalton’s own childhood in Brisbane’s Darra and Bracken Ridge – years spent in a sort of grimy splendour of crime, drugs and violence mixed with equal parts love and wonder.
The hero of that story, 12-year-old Eli Bell, is in some ways, but not all, Dalton as a child (they share, among other things, a freckle on a knuckle and a convicted murderer for a babysitter).
And while All Our Shimmering Skies is a different animal altogether, borrowing far less from Dalton’s early years, there is a lovely and particularly Dalton-esque link between the two.
“All Our Shimmering Skies is the book I like to think Eli Bell would have been reading on a stained mattress in that Housing Commission home in Bracken Ridge all those years ago,” Dalton smiles.
“I know from my own boyhood what a precious act of magic reading is to escape, so I wanted to write the book that Eli would read, the type of book I loved as a kid, full of adventure and riddles and magic and impossible quests .”
And All Our Shimmering Skies is very much a Boy’s Own adventure/Homer’s Odyssey except, this time around, it’s not a boy taking on the universe, it’s a girl who is the book’s heart and chief rock-carrier (literally and figuratively), Molly Hook.
The book begins with a curse, a long-agodamning that 12-year-old motherless Molly Hook believes has been placed on her family of gravediggers tending to the dead in a Darwin cemetery in 1942.
When the sky opens with a confetti of Japanese bombs over the Northern Territory capital, Molly sees her chance to run from her brutal life spent knee-deep among the dead in Darwin’s copper-coloured clay, and go in search of Longcoat Bob, the man she believes cursed her family decades earlier.
For Dalton, the surprise attack on Darwin on the morning of February 19, 1942 – where 242 Japanese aircraft dropped 681 bombs, killing 236 soldiers and civilians – was both irresistible as a writer, and an opportunity to tell a woefully neglected (in popular culture) part of Australian history.
“Aren’t we as writers always looking for that dramatic moment, and what could be more dramatic than what happened there?” Dalton asks.
“It astounds me that more hasn’t been written about it.
“So many stories – a priest (John McGrath) was the first to see the bombers, he was living on the Tiwi Islands off Darwin, and he sent word by radio that he had seen the most terrifying, V-shaped fleet of Japanese fighters in the skies. At his funeral years later, elderly Islanders told of him literally sheltering kids with his back, getting them to safety.
“Then you hear all the other stories – the Japanese fighter pilot (Hajime Toyoshima) who crashed into the scrub and was captured by an Indigenous man (Matthias Ulungura) who handed him over to authorities. That’s one of the most amazing, historical encounters in Australian history – imagine being that fighter pilot, crashing into that landscape.”
For his book, Dalton immersed himself in both that history and landscape; Molly’s journey taking her beyond a bomb-flecked Darwin into the vine-covered, deep country beyond it, places where Dalton, as a journalist has travelled. Places where he says he has seen and heard and felt the earth’s magic.
“When I was writing a piece about the high prevalence of Machado-Joseph disease on Groote Eylandt, off the remote coast of Arnhem Land, I met an extraordinary human being called Steve Bakala Wurramara, and he took me on these walks, and he started telling me about curses, and magic and bush medicine.”
Dalton travelled also, post-Boy Swallows Universe, to the Territory’s Litchfield National Park on what he calls his own “quest”, walking deep into the park’s belly with Indigenous guide, Tess Atie, who told him about the spirits who dwelled within it, and the salvation that could be found there.
Atie also checked passages for accuracy and sensitivity and told him, Dalton grins, “Don’t be a dickhead, that would be stupid”, in response to some of his more outlandish ideas.
Dalton laughs.
“I can get a little bit carried away.”
When Molly Hook travels to the places where Dalton walked, she has two companions with her. By her side was an older woman, Greta Maze, a bombshell actress with a bruised-apple face and a scarred heart, and a Japanese fighter pilot, Yukio Miki, who, just like Toyoshima, fell out of his plane and landed at Molly and Greta’s feet, like a gift from the sky.
Sky gifts are writ large in Dalton’s book; four gifts (identified in the story as a map, a friend, a miracle, and the end) punctuate Molly’s journey, as does the sky itself.
“Nothing you can say to the sky is unheard,’’ Dalton says.
“After Boy Swallows Universe came out, there was a part of its success that was deeply unsettling, because I wrote that book under the presumption – and I am not being falsely modest – that some people would read it and think, because it was so ambitious and crazy and a little wild, ‘What the hell?’
“And I wrote it because I wanted to get that legacy out you know, not for ego, not for pride, not my family’s comfort. It was a soul cough, and then it became this other thing and I thought at one stage, ‘What have I done?’
“My family did not ask for that, it’s not easy, I have three older brothers and they have to go to parent-teacher night, you know, but then this beautiful flip side happened, and I’d go to these book events and people would tell me about the rocks they carried, it was like, ‘Man, check my rocks out’.
“My dad died before the whole Boy Swallows Universe thing happened, and after I went into the bush in Groote Eylandt I was having a beer on the beach and I’m looking up at the sky and I’m talking to my Dad, and I say: ‘Hey Dad, can you believe my book, what happened to it? They’re making a TV show out of it, Dad, and I think you’d really like the book’, and I am just so full of longing for my father, just like Molly is so full of longing for her mother, and in that moment of longing, we all look to the sky for our answers.
“I understood very clearly then that under the sky we are all the same, carrying our rocks on our journeys.”
There are day skies and night skies also in Dalton’s book, painting arcs of light and darkness, particularly in the passages where Molly is being abused by her uncle and neglected by her father – passages Dalton says his wife Fiona, mother to their two daughters, 13 and 11, struggled to read.
“I think as a mother to two beautiful girls, that dark stuff is hard to take, but I know that that dark stuff does not have to be the destruction of you, it can be the making of you.
“I have been in kitchens at 2am with men who are violent, then crept into my bed to read, to escape, and I know what it is like to have this day sky of a man you love so much turn into this darkness … how can you be that night sky when your day sky is so good?”
But the book, beneath its gothic horrors, is also brimming with great dollops of joy, moments of deep forgiveness, redemption and love – all the wonders taking place beneath all our shimmering skies.
All Our Shimmering Skies by Trent Dalton out September 28, HarperCollins, $33.
You can buy the book for 35 per cent off RRP with Booktopia, by entering the code SHIMMERING at the checkout from Sunday.
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