Rodney Hall’s Vortex

Rodney Hall, Vortex (Picador 2024)

I haven’t read anything by Rodney Hall since the early 70s, and then it was just one book of poetry and one novella. Since then he has had thirteen more novels published, as well as ten more poetry collections, a collection of short fictions, two biographies – and non-fiction, an opera libretto and radio plays (not an exhaustive list), not to mention that he has won any number of prestigious prizes and accolades.

So it may be because I’m coming late to his writing that Vortex had me feeling off kilter pretty much from start to finish. On any page there’s something to enjoy, appreciate, puzzle over or be wowed by. But I don’t think I ever had a sense of the book as a whole.

There’s Brisbane in 1954: the Queen’s visit, a spectacular water-weed infestation, an exhibition of Tollund Man in the museum, a cyclone, the aftermath of the US army’s stay there in World War Two, the beginnings of ASIO domestic spying. Vladimir Petrov makes a cameo appearance. Entertaining endnotes underline the historicity of some of these features and events, even while asserting that the book is fiction.

And there’s 1954 beyond Brisbane: the Mau Mau in Kenya, the Royal Charter for North Borneo, the battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, and a boatload of refugees.

There’s Compton Gillespie, a young, bookish working-class teenager who befriends Beckmann, a German man, formerly a member of the Hitler Youth, possibly homosexual, who dances with women for money. Any sexual tension in the novel is between these characters.

There’s Paloma, a Spanish countess who presides over a table of European migrants and refugees at the Colony Club, where the conversation is witty, urbane, and mildly satirical of the host culture.

Paloma’s husband, a crude member of the public service with aspirations to gentility, is involved in cloak and dagger intrigue with the Americans while playing some kind of role in making sure the Queen’s visit goes well.

Vassily Bogdanovich Hmelnitsky, ‘thirty years a homeless vagrant’, wanders the streets of Brisbane.

There are flash-forwards. John Howard’s ‘We will decide’ speech, or near enough, turns up in the dialogue. Scott Morrison is a mysterious presence in someone’s dream.

These narrative strands intersect: the boy takes a photo of the countess; the vagrant takes shelter in the Colony Club during a downpour; the queen speaks to the boy’s mother on her hospital visit. And there’s a fairly improbable tying up of at least some threads at the end. But it’s hard for the mind to find purchase.

And maybe that’s the point. Apart from the first, each chapter and subsection of a chapter begins in mid-sentence without a capital letter: ‘or how to kill so much time?’ (Chapter 2); ‘and because none of Professor Antal Bródy’s three doctorates is recognized by the University of Queensland’ (Chapter 3); ‘because the night is warm and splendid with stars’ (Chapter 6); and so on. Similarly, they all (including the final one) end mid-sentence and without a full stop. There’s a constant sense that we aren’t getting the full story: we are seeing and hearing only moments from a great, complex, uncontainable whole.

The received version of 1950s Australia is that it was boring, monocultural, conformist. This book challenges that view. Its sympathetic characters are all in one way or another non-conformist and questioning, and its Brisbane is part of the great movement of people around the globe that began after World War Two and continues until now. I think that’s the vortex of the title. Here’s a paragraph from page 230:

from an observation balloon the vast seething mass of displaced persons is caught and processed by still photographs. From a thousand feet up an aerial platform provides intelligence pinpointing any breakouts in the movement of the desperate massed figures below. Unseen analysts make their scrupulous adjustments

This paragraph is typically complex.

First, it wrenches our attention from its immediate context, in which Beckmann is being challenged about his relationship with Compton, to the general question of refugees. There’s a suggestion that the same thing happens at different scales: Beckmann’s roommate questions him, the unseen analysts do their work. This movement from Brisbane to international scenes happens regularly in the novel.

Second, it draws attention to the time-specific nature of the book: in 2024, readers are used to surveillance – in 1954, this paragraph insists, it was already a thing, but it was much more primitive, depending on still photographs rather than video streams, and observation balloons rather than satellites or even spy planes.

Third – and this is how I first read it – it suggests something about the book itself. Its true subject is ‘the vast seething mass of displaced persons’, but it captures and processes it, not by still photographs, but by word sketches, anecdotes, scraps of dialogue, fractures narrative arcs. It does it, not from a distance of a thousand feet, but in close-up, paying attention to the details of people’s lives.

I can see that, and respect it, but in the reading I was mostly unengaged.