Elegantly and chaotically, Rodney Hall falls into the vortex of history
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 historical event has come to mark this year with its signature. It is a year that seems slightly to the side of things: a prelude to the major act, perhaps, whatever that might be.
World War II was finished and the nuclear age inaugurated. Stalin had died in the previous year and an uneasy truce existed in Korea. Decolonisation was rolling back Europe’s hold on the world. There was a major rebellion in Kenya, an insurgency in Indonesia, an emergency in Malaya, and a brewing contest in Suez. In Vietnam, the French were about to “pass responsibility for the war to the United States of America”. It was still three years before Sputnik launched.
The Brisbane in which Vortex takes place is also somewhat to the side of things. The city itself has more or less recovered from the stationing of tens of thousands of American troops, who have left behind “the blunted rasp of excitement and a trail of wrecked hopes for an entire generation of children who bear no resemblance to their legitimate fathers”.
Yet Australia in the 1950s, rather than throwing off the colonial yoke, is snuggling back into it. With the wartime excitement over, Brisbane seems to have sunk back into its colonial torpor. The big event of the year, which bookends the novel, is the visit of the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II.
Everything is both dull and faintly ridiculous. And indeed, the novel is written mainly in the mode of farce, reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon or, closer to home, the narrative poetry of Hall’s contemporary Chris Wallace-Crabbe. The cast of characters are unashamed caricatures, who stand for certain sensibilities.
There is Colonel Claverhouse, the toadying official, who swoons over the imminent royal visitation. He has been assigned to provide security and school the provincial politicians in royal etiquette. The apogee of the Colonel’s life was receiving a sympathy card from the Duke of Windsor on the death of his favourite short-haired pointer.
Claverhouse is inexplicably married to the exotic Spanish countess Paloma, who has accompanied her husband back from his posting in Europe to the subtropical provinces of Australia. She is deeply regretting this decision and finds refuge in the Colony Club.
With Paloma as its salonnière, the Colony Club becomes an improbable oasis of European sophistication in 1950s Brisbane. It draws in a circle of urbane emigrés, including Mrs Ruxandra Hudişteanu, a viola player at the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, and Dr Antal Bródy, who has doctorates in philology and philosophy from Budapest and divinity from Vienna, but now works as a wholesale umbrella salesman.
These Europeans are representatives of postwar mass European immigration in Australia. They are put up as a pointed contrast to the meagre Anglophilia of Claverhouse and his ilk.
Queen Elizabeth II arriving at Government House, Brisbane, March 1954.
State Library of Queensland, via Wikimedia Commons
While Vortex scrambles the assumptions of historicism, it is nevertheless bound together by a classical narrative patterning. The novel is the coming-of-age story of the gormless but sweet Compton Gillespie, 16 years old and living alone since his mother’s admission into hospital. One lazy day, Compton’s drifting life takes on a sudden new meaning when he meets a German immigrant named Beckmann, an older man who takes him under his wing.
The relationship between these two men is the sentimental counterpoint to the vortex. But what is this vortex, after all? It turns out the vortex that seems to suck world-historical time into its cyclonic gravity is grounded in intimate loss. We find out rather late in the tale that Compton’s father has died during the war. His mother has kept their family going on a small widow’s pension.
The black hole of this missing nameless father, carried into the world by war and never returning, powers the novel’s galaxy. All the novel’s pathetic pieces are slowly and ceaselessly falling into this void: “all that’s needed at the heart of the galaxy is a black hole to hold everything together”.
Compton falls in love with Beckmann, who is beset with the ambivalence of the missing father. Beckmann is all the things Compton’s father is not: cosmopolitan, thoughtful, alive. Even so, Compton cannot help but resent the fact that this dashing former German soldier, who survived the Russian catastrophe, was here in stupid, stinking Brisbane and his father never made it back: “Did you get a
medal for killing us?”
Beckmann, because this is the point of him, does not shirk his role. He accepts the young man’s confused love, helping Compton to see that frailty in men is also the only source of their dignity.
Other darknesses
There are other darknesses in the novel that situate Compton and Beckmann. These are progressively revealed, but often in rather offhand and belated ways. Crucial facts, determining moments, come to us as afterthoughts.
The transition between fathers is symbolised by the succession of paternal objects. When Beckmann meets Compton at the museum, his prized possession is his father’s Voigtländer camera. His mother has given him the camera, even though Compton cannot afford to buy film. Later, Beckmann gives Compton his Felca watch.
Each object has a hidden interior. The camera has unexposed film that holds the surprising final frames of his father’s Australian life. The watch has a heartbeat that persists beyond the wearer’s own.
Rodney Hall.
Pan Macmillan Australia
It would be remiss to not mention the beauty of this novel, which emerges at different scales. Most immediately, it is a joy to read the limpid prose that skips about with such mercurial agility. The style is somehow both languid and aphoristic. There is a stinging sharpness in the novel’s droll humour that speaks to a certain foundational absurdity.
The rag-tag sophisticates and minor aristocracy of the Colony Club has 1950s Brisbane as an unlikely version of the sanitorium in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, with Compton as the young Hans Castorp and Beckmann as the humanist Settembrini. The dialogue, deliberately stagey and persistently arch, may not be to everyone’s taste. But it is also peppered with witticisms that could be compared, not unfairly, to Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward. Indeed, Coward wrote a play called The Vortex in 1924.
But there is a further beauty in the novel’s sheer ambition. The backstories of the vagabond cast introduce a depth to Hall’s slice of history. In the midst of farce, the novel slowly conjures the outlines of a tragedy. In farce, as in tragedy, the high are brought low, but only in the latter are we moved to accept something we would prefer not to.
The paternal gifts that demarcate Compton’s growing up are underwritten by an irrevocable loss. At the perimeter, things move with an almost stately grandeur, but as we get closer to the centre an uneasy acceleration sets in. Läs mer…