Vortex

Susan Midalia's Review

The rather cliched term ‘a national living treasure’ certainly applies to Australian writer Rodney Hall. A poet, short story writer, memoirist and author of 14 novels, Hall has twice won the prestigious Miles Franklin Award, as well as a host of other literary prizes. His new novel Vortex shows that he has no intention of slowing down, nor is there any sign that his imaginative powers are waning. On the contrary, Vortex is a tour de force: thematically complex, formally inventive and stylistically evocative, with a sensuous rendering of place, it is arguably Hall’s best novel yet.

Set in Brisbane in 1954 during the visit of a young Queen Elizabeth, Vortex creates a wonderfully vivid cast of characters. A fatherless adolescent who befriends a former German soldier. A puffed-up Colonel and his eccentric wife, a former Spanish Contessa. A multi-lingual European migrant and former academic, now selling umbrellas in the suburbs. A Tsarist sympathiser reduced to becoming a homeless derelict. A dipsomaniac politician intent on punishing foreigners. As the list suggests, Hall is concerned with the realities of migrant and refugee experience; with loss, trauma and existential alienation in the context of Cold War paranoia and a parochial Australian culture. There are conspiracies and spies, including the infamous case of the Petrovs, and an abiding sense of mystery and irresolution. The novel is also particularly skilled at depicting the brutalities of the past; at rendering moments that continue to haunt the exiles in their adopted country.

It must also be said that this big, sprawling novel is not an easy read. It’s highly ambitious in scope, uses multiple perspectives, blends the present and the past, and makes use of gaps and silences in the story that a more conventional novel would explain. In short, Vortex requires its readers to do a good deal of work. But the rewards are profound. It expands our understanding of a particular historical moment by recreating the lived experience of the displaced and the suffering. Its shifting time lines ask to reflect on the appalling plight of the today’s global refugees. It reminds us that the novel as a narrative form can jolt us out of our indifference to injustice; as one of the characters, quoting the famous Kafka declaration, puts it: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

There’s also space for humour - sly, biting, parodic - in this remarkable new novel from one of Australia’s greatest writers.

Publisher's Review 

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 major: 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