FICTION
Lola in the Mirror
Trent Dalton
Fourth Estate,$32.99
Trent Dalton’s last book, Love Stories,laid the groundwork for his latest one. The charivari of lives that offered their stories to him day after day at his post in Brisbane’s CBD,each one a colourful little fragment in that big mosaic of a book,was tantalising because each one flashed across the pages and then sank away back into mystery again.
It was a thoughtful and charming idea,and now he has decided to explore more deeply a fictional teller of her own story,one as unpredictable and fantastic as any of the true stories that have inspired it. Here there will be mystery,but he will delve for us and offer us what? Closure? Resolution?
The story begins with a 17-year-old girl,homeless with her mother in Brisbane’s city outskirts. The two women have been on the run as long as she can remember,and she has never been allowed to know her real name in case she accidentally tells someone. That would bring the authorities down on both their heads. New names are adopted with every new place they come to. She often sees,as in a vision,Lola,another self,in her mirror. Lola offers gnomic pronouncements and seems to have the kind of centred sureness of her place in life that the young protagonist necessarily lacks because of her fugitive status and ignorance of her own origins.
What the women are fleeing is the Tyrannosaurus-headed male violence seen in the girl’s own drawings. She cannot remember any details,but her mother bears burn scars all over her arms,from something unspeakable in the past.
Details are lacking in her mother’s explanations,as the child-protection people or custody people,or police or whatever inquisitive and interfering bureaucrat might find out too much and then disaster would happen,worse than living in a leaky derelict van with no money. Explanations are made eventually,but we suffer and speculate along with the girl herself until the truth is discovered:things are seldom what they seem at first.
The girl wants to be an artist,and the drawings and diary entries bear potent witness to it,as Dalton creates a future art-history retrospective commentary about her life and work. A high destiny may await her if she isn’t murdered first.
Dalton shows us that homeless people,particularly women and youth,face stark choices when it comes to the need for money. The girl and her mum deliver drugs for the terrifying Flo and her appalling son Brandon,and that Faustian bargain supplies them with food and a kind of protection that always has the threat of death about it.