Free falling: Love, murder and mayhem in the ‘burbs
Trent Dalton’s new novel Gravity Let Me Go takes us into the heart of darkness in a Brisbane suburb that is all too familiar.
As we begin the week, Trent Dalton’s new novel Gravity Let Me Go is hitting book stores and his publisher reckons he has a superpower.
That superpower, according to Catherine Milne, is “the size of his heart, which is on full display in this dark, rollicking, tense, grittily funny and powerfully moving novel which is surprising in all the best of ways”.
Even if it did make me wince a bit at first. I say that because the central character, Noah Cork, (a journalist, like Dalton) is having some testicular issues from the outset. And we get quite a bit of detail about that as we begin the journey into a suburban world where mayhem and murder mix in equal measure. I was going to suggest that his opening grabs you by the … well, you know what I mean.
‘I’ve mined my own failings for it and my own anxieties and my own secrets’
“Feels like a medieval coin bag sewn from the skin of a forest witch. I’m forty-four years old but my scrotum must be eighty-eight. Zoom in on all my naked panic, if you think you can stomach it.”
Too much information? And so it is that Dalton plunges us straight in at the deep end. Dalton is around the same age as this Noah Cork bloke, who resembles him in many ways. He is him but not him and that’s how he rolls.
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“This is the most personal book I’ve ever written,” Dalton confesses. “It’s a marriage story buried inside a murder mystery. It’s a story about a journalist, a husband, a father of two living in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, who becomes so obsessed with the true-crime scoop of his lifetime that he almost misses an even bigger scoop: the one about true love and the very meaning of his life.
“I’ve mined my own failings for it and my own anxieties and my own secrets. I spent two decades as a feature journalist exploring the darkness that exists beneath the sunshine suburbs of Australia. My job for twenty years was to knock on closed doors across the suburbs and unpeel the most shocking layers of darkness that ordinary Australians keep locked in the basements of their souls. I wanted to put all that darkness of the suburbs into this book, along with all the light I’ve been blinded by in the same suburbs, too.”
Among other subjects he wanted to “explore confusions and misunderstandings and misreads inside modern marriage: those alien moments in a long-term relationship when everything seems beautiful and all seems lost, all in the space of one single storm season”.
He does that, boy does he do that, in chapters that all begin with a quote from Professor Lionel Rutledge’s 1996 second edition of Journalism Practices and Principles. It’s a clever through line following the life of a journalist.
Another through line is the mysterious phrase etched on his bathroom mirror – “gravity let me go”. It’s a mystery like the red phone in Boy Swallows Universe and it reoccurs throughout this racy, high-octane suburban tale set in a suburb that may or may not resemble the suburb in which Dalton and his family live.
The suburb in the book is Jubilee, named after Jubilee Terrace, one of his favourite streets. There isn’t a modern suburb of Brisbane called Jubilee, but the name was used for a historic township in the suburb of Bardon, established in 1887 to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Gold Jubilee. There is a Jubilee township still, but not a suburb.
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he is the author of a best-selling true crime book and is grappling with his marriage and being a dad and also with a murder mystery
Like Boy Swallows Universe this is a very Brisbane book and one of the most enjoyable parts for me are the descriptions of the city we love, although Dalton’s vision of it is a tad darker than most others’ as he digs beneath the surface of people and places.
In the novel he is the author of a best-selling true crime book and is grappling with his marriage and being a dad and also with a murder mystery, which is grisly and compelling as he probes his own suburban heart of darkness.
So, it is suburban Brisbane but not as you know it, although with all the detail. As it progresses you can feel the humidity and the coming storm. There are crazy neighbours, nosy neighbours, Satanists, cops and all types of other unusual ordinary people. The book is funny, too, despite the darkness.
As well as wincing I laughed when the protagonist is finally forced to confront his testicular pain: “Well, Mr Cork, it seems we now need to bring some emergency stress relief to your right plum, which is in a bit of a state,” Dr Hong says. Again, ouch.
To say this novel is intense is an understatement. There’s the same grittiness of Boy Swallows Universe and the same honesty that was revealed in Love Stories.
I’m guessing that it won’t be too long before I’m attending the world premiere of the Netflix series based on this one, too. Can’t wait to see who they get to play Noah Cork.
Gravity Let Me Go by Trent Dalton, Fourth Estate, $34.