If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll know that Trent Dalton is one of my new favourite authors. So, I was excited to read this book after discovering the book I took with me on tour was one I'd read before, giving me an excuse to head to a bookshop in Christchurch.
Unfortunately, I didn't love this book.
There are moments that are as beautiful his other books, and the darkness and brutality are ever present, but I have to say, I didn't like the main character at all. In fact, I didn't like any of the characters much.
Noah Cork is a journalist who has spent his career digging into crime. After exposing some police corruption, his access to the police has been cut off and he's been struggling until the scoop of a lifetime drops, literally, into his letterbox. The resulting book, a lurid true-crime story about a local woman's disappearance, is shooting up the rankings and Noah might finally be able to get the second bathroom he and his daughters have wanted for so long.
But things aren't all a wonderful as they might seem. Someone seems intent on killing Noah. And what do the strange words written on his bathroom mirror mean? Do they have anything to do with why his wife seems to have taken a sudden vow of silence? As a severe storm bears down on Brisbane, Noah is forced to face some of his own darkest secrets and decide if his own story is important enough to share.
I wanted to like this book so much more than I did. I've fallen so in love with Dalton's prose over the course of the three books I've read from him this year, I fully expected this one to be as good. But I struggled with this one. In the first third of the book, Noah is dealing with pain in his balls which turns out to be the result of a knotted or twisted testicle that requires surgery. I guess it's something that happens, but I really did not need to hear about this character's gonads in great detail through so much of the book. I mean, I know guys tend to be obsessed with them, but really?
Noah's kids are also way to clever and smart-mouthed to be believed and his wife, who may or may not possess some kind of miraculous magical power, never really becomes a real person. She's someone we hear about through others and when everyone is calling her a saint, it's difficult to believe she is entirely without flaws.
So, I reluctantly have to say I wouldn't recommend this one. If you want to read a Brisbane based crime novel by this author, I'd suggest you read Boy Swallows Universe instead. It's much better.
But don't just listen to me. Here's the blurb:
Noah Cork has just published the scoop of a white-hot true-crime book about the cold-blooded killer who slipped an unfolding murder mystery into his mailbox. But if this is his moment of triumph, then why is the tin roof being ripped from the walls of his reality? Why are skeletons standing upright in his closet? Why do people want to run him over in the street? And why does his wife keep writing a cryptic message across the bathroom mirror? As a severe storm heads towards Brisbane, Noah is hurtling headfirst into a swirling storm of secrets. He must now cling for dear life to the only story that ever really mattered. He must hold on to the truth. He must hold on to the story. He must hold on to love.
Dark, gritty, hilarious and unexpected, Gravity Let Me Go is Trent Dalton's deeply personal exploration of marriage and ambition, truth-telling and truth-omitting, self-deception and self-preservation. It's a novel about the stories we want to tell the world and those we shouldn't, and how the stories we keep locked away are so often the stories that come to define us.
It's the story of a murder.
It's the story of a marriage.
It's the story of a lifetime.
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