Review: Lola In The Mirror by Trent Dalton

This novel is set in the very recent past — 2022 to 2024 — but much of it feels out of time. The pandemic, it seems, never happened. There’s talk of Golden Age Hollywood. The only things that really date it are the heavily foregrounded apocalyptic flooding that sets the scene for the novel’s climax — a reference to recent Brisbane floods perhaps — and the looming Olympics.

Lola In The Mirror is a seductive fairy tale. It has magic broken mirrors that suggest roads not taken and the haphazardness of fate, a bit like Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. It has monsters and villains, and princes who live in castles and properly “see” our heroine. Set around the banks of the Brisbane River, it tells of our unnamed narrator, sleeping rough in a scrapyard with her mother. They’re on the run, fleeing, or so our narrator thinks, her violent father with whom her mother danced the “Tyrannosaurus Waltz … the dance of mothers and their monsters”. In Brisbane they push drugs while the protagonist sketches life around her, imagining her future in which she is an artist being exhibited in the New York Met (the novel is framed as a guided tour of her retrospective; the guide regularly intervenes to tell her story in third person. Drawings intersperse the chapters).

Our narrator is winsome, so easy to root for that there’s little room for anything more complicated: down on her luck but with a heart of gold, a knack for talking herself out of a nasty situation, handy with a filleting knife (but only when absolutely called for). She feels she is a mistake, her life a result of horrific violence. Her mother, or the person she believes to be her mother, has left her without a name in order to protect her while they’re on the run. But her mother exits before she can reveal her secrets, leaving Lola In The Mirror to be driven by the timeless questions of who am I? What is my story? And who is charged with telling it? “The world turns,” her mother tells her, her parting words of stoic wisdom to stick it out and remain faithful that things will get better.

This is an evocative portrait of the river city, and Trent Dalton has a talent for the kind of broad characterisation that fairytales demand (aided by the narrator’s penchant for stating the meaning of names; she’s a walking Penguin Book Of Names For Australian Babies). You might compare it to the observation of a street portraitist. Take a particularly enchanting sketch of one of the narrator’s customers, Ursula, which she reminds us means “she-bear”, and who once styled Nicole Kidman for an awards night:

She has put on make-up, even though I’ll be her only guest today. She wears a blue MAC lipstick she likes, called Viva Glam; a broad black velvet headband over thick, straight, white ponytailed hair; a purple satin mini shift dress that exposes her kneecaps and her long legs, thin as tent poles; and black velvet heels. A thick blue vein awakens beneath Ursula’s white skin and I wonder if her nervous system is just a series of branches stretching from a tree of electric blue light planted in her stomach.

Lola In The Mirror is built of such details, whether character or action. Still, the nostalgia is a puzzle. Dalton clearly has contemporary issues on his mind — cost of living, housing, crime — things denominated “crisis” when they become convenient for politicians. His portrayal of domestic violence is harrowing. Dalton has been called “the definitive novelist of Scott Morrison’s Australia”, although there is little of Morrison’s meanness in Lola In The Mirror (well, perhaps there is some of it in Dalton’s villains). There is though a sense of longing for a fantasy past, where good was good and bad was bad. The cops and the rich are benevolent, ready to swoop in and pluck you from misfortune. The world turns, if only you can wait for it to do so.

Gay rating: not gay.