Simon McDonald

I want to like Trent Dalton’s books, because Trent Dalton is so damn likeable.

There’s probably not a kinder, more sentimental, or as gregarious a soul on the planet. But his fiction has never clicked for me. Something about his prose, his particular storytelling peculiarities, its cadence and sentimentality—it just hasn’t worked. I took a punt on Gravity Let Me Go because of its murder mystery element. And because, like I said—I want to like Dalton’s books!

At the centre of GLMG is crime reporter Noah Cork. He is utterly insufferable, and though this is intentional, an intentionally insufferable character is still insufferable. And the whole novel is framed from his perspective!

Not too long ago, a killer slipped a note into Noah’s mailbox in the picturesque Brisbane suburb of Jubilee—“hello lemon drop”—and following this killer’s trail of breadcrumbs, Noah discovered the skeletal remains of Tamsin Fellows. Six months later, it’s publication day for his true crime debut Anonymous Source. Big things are expected—sales and media. That rarest of combinations for a debut!

Though the identity of the killer plays an integral role in proceedings—vital to the excitement of the novel’s climax, alongside an apocalyptic storm—GLMG is less about unravelling that mystery, and more about the price paid by Cork, and those closest to him, as he becomes focused exclusively on his manuscript.

He says that’s the cost of being a reporter; forsake everything for the truth, for the story. But his ambition threatens to wreck his marriage, derail his relationship with his daughters, and cost him the little time he has left with his dying father.

As his life careens off course, Noah becomes more cognizant of his personal failings; and as he achieves greater self-awareness, he becomes gradually less insufferable. I preferred GLMG as a meditation on the corrosiveness of a man’s ambition, and as a family drama, rather than the melodramatic thriller it becomes in its final third. And I was a little surprised more’s not made of the morality of true crime reportage. But altogether, this is a slick and skilfully assembled page-turner. I liked it.