Lola in the Mirror review: new novel confirms Trent Dalton is a star

Trent Dalton once said he wasn’t worthy to wax Tim Winton’s surfboard. Three novels in, he’s not just fit to wax it but perhaps even take it into the shallows.

Trent Dalton says the problem of homelessness, particularly among women, is getting worse.

Trent Dalton’s third novel, Lola in the Mirror, reminds me of the 1980s advertising slogan for the author’s home state of Queensland: Beautiful one day, perfect the next.

I’m speaking of the quality of the writing, not the plot of the novel, in which the author pokes and prods at Brisbane’s ugly criminal underbelly, as he did in his mega-selling 2018 debut Boy Swallows Universe.

There is a glorious moment where the two sides, prose and plot, come together into something perfect. It involves a girl, who is the narrator, and a boy meeting on a bridge over the “high and irritated” Brisbane River.

It’s about the first words he will say to her, the ones that will be indelible in time and never able to be altered. He thinks. He says the words. She responds.

He raises his hands in the air. Looks around at the night. What could he possibly be looking at?

“Do you feel that?’’ he asks.

“Feel what?”

“The alive. The alive of the moment.’’

“The alive?’’

“Yeah, the alive,’’ he says. ‘‘You gotta say it like it’s got a capital T and a capital A. The Alive. I swear, some thing you just said made me think about The Alive. Like being alive is a thing that you touch and feel. As real a thing as electricity. Do you feel that? It’s The Alive.”

I feel it. Though I don’t tell him I feel it, because I’m still not entirely sure what it is.

This is one of the strings of this multi-stringed novel: young romance, with all its uncertainties and complications. Others include a crime thriller – the final third is a heart-racing page-turner – a coming-of-age story, a dysfunctional family drama, an artistic struggle and an exploration of social problems Australia should not have, such as homelessness.

It’s as Shakespeare puts it in one of his sonnets: “Mark how one string, sweet husband to another … / Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing” – except that the husband involved is not sweet or pleasing.

In the opening chapter, The Tyrannosaurus Waltz, the unnamed narrator tells us how her mother ended her dance with a ruthless dinosaur.

She took “a paring knife from the dish rack beside the kitchen sink and thrust it into the soft flesh beneath the monster’s Adam’s apple”.

From this moment, mother and daughter are on the run, fleeing from state to state, living as houseless – the narrator disagrees with the word homeless – people. “Names are dangerous for girls on the lam.”

In the present time, the narrator is almost 18, on which birthday her mother promises to turn herself into the police. This, at least, is what the narrator has been told, and what she tells us. She, and we, will learn it’s far from the full story. There are deceptions, outright lies and, worst of all, untold truths. As the truths are gradually revealed, it is as tragic as anything Shakespeare wrote.

“Who was my mother before she ran?” the narrator asks. Where did we live? Who was I? Who am I?” She has to decide whether to “walk through this life of mine” or “choose wonder” and “cartwheel through it”. Her mother tells her that one day she will waltz with a prince.

Dalton, who has two teenage daughters, takes a risk in telling the story through the eyes, heart and mind of a 17-year-old girl. I think he succeeds. I can see and hear the girl with no name. She is real.

The narrator and her mother are living in a broken down Toyota Hiace van in an abandoned scrap yard near the river. This is their home and the other houseless people living in wrecked cars is their community, one that lives in generosity and hope, not bitterness and despair.

Dalton, who has investigated homelessness in his journalism, draws this home sympathetically and beautifully. The cars, all identified by colour, make, model, year and state of disrepair, are characters in their own right.

Suburban Brisbane, his home patch, he brings alive.

“Backyard clotheslines. Mango trees with green fruit and weak branches. Orange-brick unit complexes.” As a reader, you can see it, hear it, smell it. He also fills the novel, bleak and painful as it is at times, with humour.

One of Oz’s residents, Ros (blue 2002 Honda Jazz), keeps a running tally of “The Battle of Good Shit ‘n’ Bad Shit”. Perhaps you need to be a certain age, but it makes me laugh to see this on the Good Shit ledger: Daryl Braithwaite in the hot-tub dream.

The scrap yard, which the inhabitants call Oz, is owned by a Mr Tinman. This nod to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is characteristic of the magic realism in each of Dalton’s novels.

Lola In The Mirror is a bold new book from Trent Dalton

One of the narrator’s few possessions is a broken full-length mirror. It’s in this cracked glass that she sees the Lola of the title. She is a woman in a red dress who seems to be able to see into the narrator’s past and future.

The narrator’s most valuable possession is a sketchbook and a fine-tipped drawing pen. She draws the “plain truth” of whatever and whoever she sees as she walks through the city. She thinks of Pablo Picasso and believes that one day she will be a great artist with paintings hanging in New York galleries.

Each chapter opens with one of her sketches (by illustrator Paul Heppell) and a card, like the sort on art gallery walls, that explains when and where it was drawn and what it might represent. Does this mean the narrator does become a famous artist, or is it her imagining a life that may or may not come?

In this novel, which is full of twists, turns and surprises, nothing can be taken for granted and everyone is more than who they seem to be.

The other main characters are Lady Flo, who runs a fresh fish shop as a cover for a drug dealing business; Brandon her musclebound enforcer son; Charlie Mould, 18, an alcoholic and the narrator’s best friend; Danny Collins, the rich boy on the bridge; and, inevitably in this world, a couple of detectives. Each comes into the narrator’s life, for reasons good and evil, through their own design but also through hers.

Lola in the Mirror is a bold, big-hearted, hopeful, humorous, dark, reflective, truthful, superbly written novel that confirms Dalton’s place in all the shimmering skies (to borrow the title of his second novel) of Australian literature. He is not a rising star but a star full stop.

I remember chatting to the author when Boy Swallows Universe was about to come into the world. I noted that Tim Winton had just published his 12th novel, The Shepherd’s Hut. Dalton laughed and said he wasn’t worthy to wax Winton’s surfboard. Three novels in, he’s not just fit to wax it but perhaps even take it into the shallows.

Stephen Romei is the former literary editor of these pages.

Lola in the Mirror

By Trent Dalton
Fourth Estate, Fiction
512pp, $32.99