Australia’s Trent Dalton has written some terrific stuff. Nearly every reviewer and reader gave Boy Swallows Universe and All Our Shimmering Skies five stars. So did I, with several tissues thrown in.
If he has a sin, it’s one of inclusion. His recent Lola in the Mirror had an engagingly gutsy young heroine, daughter of a mum apparently fleeing brutality, who exists mostly in a junkyard near the Brisbane River. There was confrontation and revelation, puppy love and catty tricks and monkey business, an excellent cop who … no, that would be a spoiler.
But then in the last 60 pages, Dalton pumped in so much violence, natural disaster, heroic rescue, ugly and almost gratuitous death that the whole thing threatened to become a swollen bladder.
There’s also been Love Stories. Cute non-fiction idea: set up a table at the corner of Adelaide and Albert streets in downtown Brisbane and invite passersby to tell you about their affairs of the heart. The result was sincere, respectful, affectionate, and ended up resembling a 300-page stack of Valentine’s Day cards. (Trent Dalton’s Love Stories plays in Auckland October 16 - 19.)
So I approached this new novel with apprehension as well as anticipation, especially since it comes in at 430 pages.
It’s set in Dalton’s Brisbane. Freelance writer Noah Cork, a chap who will try anything, including crafting real estate ads, has landed a dream project. A killer has left an initialled note in his letterbox, along with a music box that plays Over the Rainbow. Noah is led via a jogging track, ruby slippers and other clues, to a commercial oven, inside which are the remains of a vanished young woman. He writes a book-length manuscript about the whole thing, complete with conjectures about the possible murderer.
Everyone’s talking about his disclos ures. He’s soaring towards success. Which means, as you’ll have guessed, that it all starts to crack and crumble very quickly.
Murder has smirched Noah’s well-kept Gecko St neighbourhood, and nobody likes him much. He’s inclined to reciprocate; suddenly the place pullulates with suspects.
He puts his life and family on pause while he tries to get a grip on events and on himself, starting with a literary festival interview-cum-inquisition featuring sprawling and howling.
A rusty Hilux tries for a hit and run. A daughter climbs over a school fence and into a dark SUV. An old and ailing photographer has vital clues.
There are four intimate episodes inside a red Hyundai Elantra. Noah’s home life crackles and storms while another tempest, of the meteorological variety, heads towards town.
Dull bits? Don’t be silly. Every 10 pages has at least one shock/drama/disclosure/threat. We’re flung backwards and sideways in time and place, as Dalton keeps it all tearing along.
We pelt past the obligatory misidentification, towards the equally obligatory confrontation with a fleshy-handed slayer, swerving briefly for Noah’s revenge on his dastardly dad.
I’ll post my own runic note here and tell you that a dull diorama hides a crazed obsession. Don’t worry about the dropped pocket knife. Don’t miss the roaring spouse or the kicked-in door. Don’t be too hard on how the second storm happens to be on its way, or on how the book’s title is slipped pretty smugly into the closing lines.
It’s crammed and clever. You may feel some parts are better than the whole, but you’ll sink fathoms deep into its plot, gasp and exclaim while you’re there, blink reluctantly back into the world and start thinking, “Hang on. Could that really …?”
The murder bits shove the mundane ones into the background most of the time, though Dalton, with good use of the two snarky and vulnerable teenage daughters, keeps nudging you in the ribs to point out how Noah’s home life is fragmenting.
We have an author who adores words. He’s drunk on them. As drunks are inclined to do, he sometimes seems unable to proceed in a straight line, lurches into metaphors, swerves across to try clever cadences and staccato sentences.
So he can’t mention a nasal hair without it “hanging from my left nostril like the rope on a church bell”. Hercules the neighbour’s dog doesn’t crap; he “punch[es] out two thick bars of solid bull-mastiff monster dog dung”. A storm doesn’t strike Noah’s suburb of Jubilee; it “barrelled in … like a drunk and vengeful gunslinger bursting through a set of swinging saloon doors in search of the outlaw who shot his mum in the heart”.
Yes, Trent, I’m sure it did. Now, do you mind getting back to the plot? Because when you write sparely and barely, your story compels; your characters cohere and convince, your readers are gripped and galvanised. Enough of the verbal cake decorating, please.
Gravity Let Me Go will fly off the shelves. It may well fly on to the big or small screen. If its author can dial himself back a few notches, his subsequent titles may wing their ways towards real significance.
