Elegantly and chaotically, Rodney Hall falls into the vortex of history
- Written by: Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, Professor, Chair of Australian Literature, The University of Western Australia
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.
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.
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.
Authors: Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, Professor, Chair of Australian Literature, The University of Western Australia
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