Glimpses of mysterious girl in mirror

Lola in the Mirror by Trent Dalton, HarperCollins, $36.99 ..

.. .. .. .. .. .. Australian author Trent Dalton’s first novels Boy Swallows Universe and All Our Shimmering Skies sold in the multi-millions. That was just in his home country.

Unquestionably Lola in the Mirror, will be up there too.

Dalton is a master wordsmith who draws on his insider’s knowledge of life’s unpleasantries. His mother and stepfather sold heroin and were jailed for it. He drew on that as for Boy Swallows

Universe.

His journalistic career has focused on community issues. These form the basis of Lola in the Mirror. The central character is houseless. Note the differentiation between that and homeless. Climate change, by way of the ongoing flooding of the Brisbane River, becomes a character too. It’s one of of unstoppable force.

Central to it all is a 17-year-old girl who lives with the woman she calls Mum in a van abandoned in a metal scrapyard on the river’s banks. They are parted when the older woman drowns in that river after an infant in a pram plunges into it.

We can’t tell you the name of the teenager. She doesn’t know it. It changed regularly to suit the circumstances of the pair’s life on the lam.

As the girl believes it they are running from a crime scene in which her mother has fatally stabbed her monster of a husband.

Consequently, the woman dances what she calls the Tyrannosaurus Waltz, sidestepping a monster. She assures the girl she will dance with a prince.

After the older woman’s death the girl takes over her drug running business, employed by the sinister “Lady” Flora Box.

An aspiring artist, her sketch book is her constant companion. She dreams of her works hanging in New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

As for Lola of the title she’s the woman the girl sees when she looks into a discarded mirror.

Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice she has questions for the looking glass. Hers is “what is my future? Whst is my past?”

Therein lies the crux of this remarkable story. It’s complex, it’s simple, it’s brutal, it’s kind, it’s beautiful, it’s ugly, it’s passionate, it’s dispassionate. Opposites compound opposites throughout.

This is Dalton at his perceptive best.

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