Rodney Hall’s Vortex is the 13th novel in a long and distinguished career that includes two Miles Franklin Literary Awards for his earlier novels Just Relations (1982) and The Grisly Wife (1994). It is a historical novel, but with a particular sense of history in mind. We are accustomed to regarding history as linear, punctuated by moments, events and personages, with all of us conveyed inexorably into a future that we cannot quite see but are confident is awaiting us.
What if this is not what is happening? In his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1942), the German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote that history’s true structure is concealed by this anodyne historicist myth. History is not marching forward; it is fleeing backwards. What is it fleeing? For Benjamin, history is fleeing the events that inaugurate it: its traumatic origins in war, invasion or revolution.
Review: Vortex – Rodney Hall (Picador) Hall’s novel has a version of Benjamin’s history at its heart – or, as we might say, its epicentre. Like Benjamin, Hall demands that we suspend our belief in history’s progress and regard it instead as a constellation that is falling – elegantly or chaotically, depending on the position we might be in – into some opaque singularity, something impossibly dense and unsurvivable. Vortex is set in Brisbane in 1954.
That 1954 should be the vanishing point is a little surprising. It is not exactly an iconic year like 1789, 1914, 1962 or 1989. No single historic.