Trent Dalton has done it again – Lola in the Mirror is Boy Swallows Universe in all its unmitigated glory, but in Lola in the Mirror we have a girl hero who’s on the rocks, fighting to gain a place in the world. This was one of my favourite books of 2023 and I do recommend it for the feisty characters, twisting plot, adversity, love and gorgeous writing all wrapped up in a thrilling read. Yes, it is sentimental and the homelessness described is packaged with optimism. Barbara Kingsolver did this with her brilliant Demon Copperhead; she gave the narration of a deprivation story to a gustsy kid with smarts. Perhaps such optimism doesn’t live in broken cars in junk yards. Or, just perhaps, it does.
The story starts with the Tyrannosaurus Waltz, one of our girl’s earliest memories. It’s the dance that happens when her father comes home and her mother doesn’t step out of the way fast enough. Some readers may know this dance. It can end in a number of ways, this one ends with mother and daughter running and hiding for years and years. They end up in a rusted van with flat tyres in Brisbane, belonging to the community of street-dwellers. I’m thinking that Brisbanites may not like this depiction of the underbelly of their city. As our girl grows up, she draws sketches of her life, compulsively, and each chapter of the book opens with one of these sketches, together with a commentary on the meaning of the drawing and the artist by a future art curator.
Girl in a Yellow Peacoat, February 2024, pen and ink on paper.
Little is known about this work beyond the fact that it was the artist’s favourite of all her early ink sketches.
Her future hangs on the wall of a gallery. She, like Kingsolver’s Demon, dreams of breaking out of destitution through art.
Our girl (she doesn’t have a name, it’s a protection thing, though Esther Inthehole calls her Liv Bytheriver), has interesting quirks. She had a thing about names, probably because she doesn’t have one, or her mother wont tell her what it is. She’s watching Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise on TV when she does a drug drop for her mother’s boss (they’re really on the edge here) and tells us that Nicole means ‘Victory of the people’ and Tom means ‘Twin’. I reached for Dr Google to check some of these names as the book is peppered with them, but decided I’m happier not knowing if Dalton made these up. As a tic, it’s a sweet one. And she has an old mirror and Lola is there in the glass – every girl needs a friend to talk to, right?
Her mother promises her she will never dance the Tyrannosaurus Waltz but will dance with a prince and she does, kind of, but it’s a hard slog to get there. This is, like in Dalton’s other stories, a fairy tale: it’s rags to riches smashed in urban grit. Chomping through mountains, swimming the oceans, sweeping the hearth and defeating witches are just metaphors for life’s challenges, and our narrator has waves of trials sent to test her. Surely, there is something absolutely universal about a little girl growing up wanting to be loved. But her mother tells her a secret and then falls into the Brisbane river trying to rescue a baby, and our girl is left at the mercy of drug queen, Flora Box, and her vicious son. She can handle them until she can’t and things go very wrong, very fast.
She has her street community, her best friend, Charlie Mould and Danny, her Prince. The love story is simple. It’s just love. Everything else is irrelevant. I like this. It’s pure. But before she gets her promised sunset scene, our girl has to rip herself away from the monsters of Brisbane’s underworld, survive a flood, and find out who she is. Where she comes from and who her people are. What her name is.
And who is Lola in the Mirror?
It’s a shame she doesn’t have a name, but nonetheless, she’s now tucked into my literary hero collection.
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