Vortex

by Rodney Hall

we only need to tease out the first stray thread, such as the lingering wake left by a white ship forging through grey light to where a thousand seabirds disappear from the collapsing sky . . . and we've begun

It is 1954, but not the same way the history books would have it. Events and characters swirl in a vortex of fragments and chance connections.

Brisbane celebrates the young Queen Elizabeth II's arrival on her first royal tour of the commonwealth. Meanwhile the future is being shaped behind closed doors, laying the foundations for the 21st century . . .

A magisterial novel resonant with contemporary concerns, by one of Australia's foremost authors writing at the height of his ambition.


Praise for Vortex

'Everything about Rodney Hall's work is the beauty of the writing, the dark and vibrant imagination, and the enormous pleasure it gives the reader. Michael Herr

'Rodney Hall writes the world as if it were lit by stormlight, a genius that recognises each facet for its singularity as well as its inherent interconnectedness.' Josephine Rowe

'Vortex is many mighty things. Above all, it is generous.' Beejay Silcox

Genres: Novels, 21st Century, Fiction

464 pages, Paperback

Published August 27, 2024

About the author

Born in Solihull, Warwickshire, England, Hall came to Australia as a child after World War II and studied at the University of Queensland. Between 1967 and 1978 he was the Poetry Editor of The Australian. After a period living in Shanghai in the 1980s, Hall returned to Australia, and took up residence in Victoria.

Hall has twice won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and has received seven nominations for the prestigious Miles Franklin Award, for which he has twice won ("Just Relations" in 1982 and "The Grisly Wife" in 1994).

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was really looking forward to Rodney Hall's new book, Vortex, but though I'm no slouch when it comes to reading challenging fiction, it turned out to be more of a challenge than I was expecting.

The experimental structure didn't faze me.  Representing the vortex of time with fragments of events all from 1954 in Australia wasn't a problem, not even the stylistic choice to begin and end each fragment with only part of a sentence, not even when it took three pages to work out which event Hall was alluding to.

For example, from 'chapter' 79, which begins with...

little families assemble outside a long rusty hut where they will be given water but sent away.  Even here the foreign empires wage the war of ideologies.  Parents must choose the safest road for their children.  Walking they pause to distribute the weight of grief.  Grief for abandoned home and homeland.  Grief for those lost and left by the wayside.  They have no plan beyond the imperative of escape.  They seek work when work's on offer.  They beg.  Swallowed by the river of loss. Eddies of an inescapable enforcement that has mostly come and gone but can still be felt. (p.309)

It could be any refugee flight... and that's the point, really.  Refugees were fleeing conflict in 1954 and it's still happening now, mostly in Africa*.  An allusion to 'elephant grass' in the next paragraph doesn't help: that grows in tropical and subtropical regions around the world: from Queensland (as forage for livestock) to the US; Central and South America; the West Indies; Southeast Asia and the Caribbean.  Then there's an allusion to the old imperial road and to partisan sharp-shooters that could be almost anywhere in the world too. It becomes clearer on the next page with an allusion to a vine-strung suspension bridge and a thatched village and bamboo house frames and monkeys.  Bombers leaving a trail of wreckage and wounded water buffalo suggest southeast Asia, and a direct reference to Dien Bien Phu on the next page confirms that this is Vietnam in the wake of the French departure. 

The flight of this nameless refugee is part of Hall's preoccupation with outsiders.  Emerging from a large cast of characters as the most important is a 16-year-old boy called Compton Gillespie, who is alone in Brisbane because his widowed mother is in hospital with a broken leg (and turns out to have cancer too.)  He's had to leave school and fend for himself, and while school was no fun for a bookish boy like him, he is frustrated by the loss of educational opportunity.  He haunts the library and the museum, and it is there that he meets Beckmann, an erudite German with enigmatic origins.  When so little time ago being German was forbidden — what is he doing in Brisbane, and what was he fleeing from?  There are spies and diplomats and the Petrovs in the novel so perhaps there are clues to answer those questions in the text and I missed them.  I think I probably missed quite a lot...

Brisbane in the 50s was parochial, in a country that was parochial too, though less so in Sydney and Melbourne. Among Hall's cast of exiles, refugees and other not-very-welcome migrants are a homeless Russian Cossack; Dr Antal Bródy who is a professor with three degrees who sells umbrellas because his qualifications aren't recognised; the Countess Paloma from Seville whose marriage of convenience to the clichéd Colonel Clavers gains her entry to the Colony Club, an outpost of bohemianism and creativity.  Clavers is caricatured like a character from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, but Dickens used caricatures too when it suited him, so I guess that's ok up to a point.  But I'm not keen on farce and I grew tired of the over-satirised fragments about them and wasn't entirely convinced when the fragments came together at the end of the book for Compton #NoSpoilers to find a patron among these characters.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/12/30/v...

[Stuart McArthur · Rating 1 out of 5]

didn’t follow a word of it.

and often it became

Maybe it was some kind of elaborate practical joke. I toiled through to 25% in hope of discovering just one investable character before collapsing into the steadily-pressing, almost mocking, logic of “continue why?”

Even if the “novel”’s purpose, to evoke the year 1954 through 100 slice-of-life strands, was honourable, the purpose itself is thwarted by the subjective and non-consequential nature of the strands. It’s just one person’s imaginings. Further muddied by a stream-of-consciousness feel.

So you’d have to be interested not just in getting a broader perspective of the year 1954 but also of one person’s guess of what 1954 not actually was, but felt like. There are more intriguing things for me to ponder in what’s left of my days.

This waving the white flag released me to read the last page. Which was indistinguishable from the first hundred. And as I was about to

[Reuben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read my review: https://www.theage.com.au/culture/boo...

[Ann Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a strange story of the lead-up to the Queen’s visit to Brisbane, the capital of Queensland, in the 1950s. We meet an assortment of characters and dip in and out of their lives with abandon, as if the reader is caught in a vortex, or whirlpool, swirling from one character to the next, one place to the next, never hearing the end of conversations, dipping into back stories, hearing about their everyday experiences.

I found it disconcerting at first, as each chapter (section? snippet?) starts mid sentence and it took a while to get into the flow of the narrative. But, once into the rhythm I thought it an interesting way of getting to know so many characters from all walks of life - although I’m still spinning from the experience!

[Sue · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading Vortex felt like a waste of time for me. No matter how much I wanted to like it, I struggled to grasp its meaning. The author’s painstaking effort is evident in the intricate prose, but the result felt like an endless string of words forming sentences without coherence or purpose.

I found myself questioning the reason behind focusing solely on the year 1954. Surely, it couldn't have been just because of the Queen’s visit to Australia? But apparently, it was. I was a child at that time, as was likely the author. Was this event truly the defining moment of his life? Of his nation’s history? Of the world around him?

This realization left me reflecting: Is our sense of meaning shaped by what we deem personally significant, even if others might find it trivial? While the book raised these questions, it ultimately fell short of offering satisfying answers or a compelling narrative to justify its premise.

[Dulcie]

Taking Georges Perec "Life. A user's manual" as the peak of the perfect multiple narrative / multiple narrator work, then Vortex is the nadir.
On a separate note if an author is trying ro establish verisimilitude by exact locations and timings, calling out readers who pick up on stupid inconsistencies as pedants is in itself pedantic, but of an offensive kind.
Like always, authors will always try and get something published. The fault lays with editors and publishers who facilitate.
Vortex is worthless junk. 0 stars.

[Robert Connelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short history of the modern world enraptured by the visitors to the Colony Club. A group of wounded, physically or mentally, refugees from past wars or homeland security. Sometimes gritty, sometimes funny but certainly written in an unusual manner which makes it hard to follow the thread of the story.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

A vortex of directionless stories.

[Georgia Phillips · Rating 1 out of 5]

DF

[David Hall · Rating 3 out of 5]

beautifully written, but somewhat directionless storyline.

[Rachel White · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written and structurally complicated to convey the way that personal stories and historical events intersect. It was not an easy read, nor one I would necessarily recommend or gift to others. Nonetheless, I found it worthwhile read from an acclaimed Australian author.