RODNEY HALL Vortex. Reviewed by Paul Anderson

Rodney Hall has won the Miles Franklin Award twice (Just Relations, The Grisly Wife); his new novel is a panoramic alternative history of the twentieth century.

Queen Elizabeth II visited Brisbane on 9 March 1954 as part of her longest-ever Commonwealth tour. A fictional version of this royal visit provides a backdrop to the closing chapters of Vortex, but the novel is not really about this or indeed any one thing: Vortex is inferential and tangential and more compelling than that. It’s a tapestry of the demise of imperialism and the assertion of people’s right to self-determination, weaving in a plethora of twentieth-century wars on colonialism and communism. At the same time as the Queen’s, other boats are more perilously heading towards Australia: those of refugees. The Queen’s pitstop in Brisbane is just one of the alternative histories whirling away in this fragmentary novel. As one central character remarks in its final pages:

‘I can assure you that by Monday morning when the flags are taken down all this trash will find itself forgotten … Mark my words. We’ll be back where we began – and no better off – which includes shouldering the evil burden of a thousand years of Europe’s diplomatic corruption and double dealing.’

Vortex is many things in motion; uppermost are the geopolitical vectors that shape our lives. All in present tense, it has the immediacy of world-historical events still playing out today. It transported me back to the rush of reading Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet of novels. Some of its concerns are the aftermath of the Second World War (‘the spiralling vortex’ thereof), the resultant Cold War (Vladimir Nikolayevich Petrov pops up), and the powerless and stateless casualties of all these wars: millions of displaced persons and asylum seekers around the world. It also bears an open wound – the foundational injustice of Britain’s invasion of our own country and the subsequent frontier massacres of First Nations Australians.

Hall is ‘recreating the Brisbane of my most anxious days’, he says in a gift of an interview with Michael Williams for the ‘Read This’ podcast series, in which he also worries about ‘the 26 or 27 wars that we of the West have fought to prevent Eastern countries making up their own minds about what system they want to live under’.

Hall would have been around 18 years of age in 1954. The author and his siblings were raised by his widowed mother. The family emigrated to Brisbane after the war and Hall remembers money being tight and school being brutal, especially for a Pom. Gone were the relatively blithe days of his English childhood, despite wartime, that he describes in his memoir Popeye Never Told You (2010): in one scene, on their way home from school one winter’s day, his sister is ‘the luckiest because she finds a frozen cobweb and she breaks it off and holds it out for me to see’.

Vortex depicts provincial Brisbane in 1954 as a melting pot of red peril: a complex web of spies and agents and the unfortunates they secretly surveil. The novel has an eclectic cast of 30 or more secondary characters with as many possible throughlines, be they glancing or oblique. Born and bred Brisbanites are outnumbered by foreigners: multiculturalism is budding (‘Cocky Calwell’s idea … Populate or Perish. That’s Labor for you,’ raves one character). We eavesdrop on a loose but culturally rich collective of European migrants – Dr Antal Bródy (a Hungarian professor), Mrs Ruxandra Hudisteanu (a Romanian viola player), among others – and we follow miscellaneous groups of Asian refugees, some fleeing the French in Vietnam, others the Dutch in Indonesia. Crikey, the locals wonder, how many of these buggers could be pinkos?

Vortex is experimental in form – ‘the novel as a web’ is the subtitle given in the prelims. It comprises 101 short chapters that almost all start mid-sentence (Hall used a simpler version of this style in Popeye Never Told You.) For example, chapter 2 flies open thus:

or how to kill so much time? A boy hanging around the hospital waiting room watches reception staff begin rolling down the blinds to signal the end of midday visiting.

The boy is 16-year-old Compton Gillespie – presumably an avatar for a teenage Hall – and it’s his mum who’s in hospital. Whereas chapter 5 launches with:

typically the countess cancels the taxi she booked. Instead, she will take a tram. Being out in the open helps with her headache. After all, she has no fixed objective in mind apart from mingling with people and attending mass at the cathedral.

The epithet ‘countess’ is used ubiquitously for Countess Paloma Rebeca Consuelo, an expatriate Spanish noble. She’s a ringleader of sorts of the convivial ‘little circolo’ of fellow travellers who meet daily, irregularly, at ‘the European Table’ in the Colony Club, a café on Edward Street that acts as a hub. As the countess says:

‘In all other places we are New Australians. But at the Colony Club we can still be European and grateful to be welcome despite the horrid things we have brought with us among our memories.’

The principal cast of Vortex comprises two odd couples. Compton’s a latchkey kid while his mum’s in hospital, and spends much of the novel amusing himself at the Queensland Museum, the State Library, and wandering the streets of the city with his Voigtländer camera (he left school at 16, like Hall). Early on, he befriends a mysterious German called Beckmann, twice his age … or is it actually the other way round? Does Beckmann take Compton under his wing? Both are isolated, admittedly, but Beckmann’s not all he seems. His first name is never given and like many characters in Vortex, his motives are never entirely spelled out. Once a German soldier who fought in the Russian campaign, now a casualty of that war and another displaced person (war is indiscriminate), Beckmann has a form of war guilt and may be on the run in Brisbane, possibly undercover? Meantime, he works as – what, a nightclub dancer? I could see him somewhere like the Molly Club in the prewar Vienna of Frank Moorhouse’s ‘Edith trilogy’ of novels. Beyond that, sadly, he remained a stranger. (As a contemporaneous companion piece, it would be edifying to re-read Cold Light (2012), the last in that series, set in 1950s Canberra and featuring the Communist Party of Australia among much else.)

Jumping next to the second couple, somehow our Spanish countess has ended up marrying one Colonel Charles Claverhouse (he prefers ‘Clavers’). He’s a British upper-class type, a rabid McCarthyite with ‘form’ in Kenya against the Mau Mau, brought out of retirement to be head spook of a newly established ASIO-like organisation. On the face of it, Clavers is preoccupied with security for the upcoming royal visit. However, he’s also moonlighting for faceless men: the Americans. His dragnet results in surveillance of his own wife (I ask you!) but that’s not the worst of his bastardry. Clavers’s apoplexy boils in each of his fragments and I so enjoyed reading this Malcolm Tucker-like character.

The head-hopping in Vortex is not for the faint-hearted, so don’t expect to ‘get’ everything. The reader is constantly being thrown out of the story as the point of view abruptly changes with each chapter, and within chapters too. It’s dizzying. In the ‘Read This’ interview, Hall says he was ‘working with an idea in the abstract … that a spider’s web is a better image for how life drops us into a multiplicity of conflicting forces. That we’re not subject to a single, strategic storyline dynamic.’ If that sounds challenging: it is.

However, Hall does grant the reader significant mercies. Compton’s and Paloma’s arcs eventually connect and are masterfully cinched at the very end of the novel. On the way through, Vortex comprises chunks of, simply put, ‘good writing’. There are evocative descriptions of an overloaded fishing vessel sinking, and of a cyclonic downpour that is superb for a whole five-page chapter, to cite but two. Elsewhere Hall’s tone is lightly teasing, the narrative voice sounding like the author’s ventriloquism. In the final chapter, a coda, Hall passes with distinction his revered test of every new novel, Kafka’s advice that, ‘A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.’ Here, we are on another boat, at night, maybe in the Timor Sea, with one of the asylum seeker groups that the novel sporadically tracks: a family of three (‘The Guide’, his wife and their boy). It’s a devastatingly moving set-piece on forced exile.

the one who must not sleep … wakes up. Surely he can’t have drifted off? Stars hail down around his head as a glitter of extinguished fires … he wakes to the terror of something gone wrong. Is this what I have done with my life? he asks, the void too vast, direction lost and languages incomprehensible.

Vortex is a hard book. It’s also a highly ambitious postwar-postcolonial take-down of a novel that has a certain capstone quality. Just let it sweep you along. It will be rewarding for Cold War buffs to read as a kind of historical fiction, as an alternative ‘this year (1954) in history’; but its themes also have a real currency with, for example, news of Britain leaving its last African colony.

An avowed socialist, Hall spins a compassionate and humanitarian web in Vortex. Readers might reflect on the world historical events that have shaped the country we now call Australia; they might not bandy the term ‘boat people’ so casually. Oh, to be this considerate, this imaginative, at any age, let alone Hall’s!

Rodney Hall Vortex Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia 2024 PB 464pp $34.99

Paul Anderson is a freelance editor. He is the co-editor of The Power of a Football, a collection of Reclink footy stories, published in 2022 by WestWords Limited.

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