LOLA IN THE MIRROR

Our most recent library book group novel.

I went along to the meeting quite unsure about Lola in the Mirror. I said to the group, ‘I don’t know what to think about this one. Maybe you can tell me.’
I still really don’t know what I think, but the group members were – for a change – almost all positive.

It’s sort of ‘modern-day Dickens in Brisbane’. The heroine-narrator, a spirited, intelligent young girl, is part of an underworld community that lives in abandoned vehicles in an old car yard. A lifetime on the run with her mother, and our heroine doesn’t know her real name, her true identity. That’s to keep her safe, Mum says. The story is, that she killed the girl’s father, her husband, before he could kill her. And then she ran, and kept running.

The narrator  and her mother struggle, scavenge, work cash in hand for a dodgy fishmonger. She attends a local homeless centre.  They make a life. Then, in a twist of fate, our nameless heroine is abruptly orphaned when her mother saves a child from drowning. Adrift in a brutal world, she consoles herself with her art (her dream is that one day she will have an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art) and her friendships with other homeless people. But she’s got to support herself somehow. So she turns to the sinister fishmonger, Lady Flo.

I’ll stop there, because I don’t know how to go on without spoilers. There’s violence, coincidence, dark and darker secrets with attendant revelations, true love, tragedy, art, kindness and cruelty to power the plot along. The group thought that the writer gave homeless people dignity, treated them with respect and care. Compassion. Even love. That it showed a side of life we tend to turn away from but need to see. That it dealt with important themes of family violence, maternal love, drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness.

Mmm. It was a very spirited discussion. But I can’t say I was convinced. I found something slightly off about the book. It was sentimental and about as subtle as a brick, but that doesn’t usually mean I can’t like something. And it’s not as if Dalton was giving his bougie readers a titillating tour of down-and-out existence; from what I’ve read, he’s a sincere person. And I did enjoy his non-fiction Love Stories very much. Lola just seemed…superficial, somehow.
But it could be that my extreme dislike of the illustrations placed throughout the book coloured the whole thing. Which must mean I am… superficial.