'we only need to tease out the first stray thread, such as the lingering wake left by a white ship forging through grey light to where a thousand seabirds disappear from the collapsing sky . . . and we've begun
'It is 1954, but not the same way the history books would have it. Events and characters swirl in a vortex of fragments and chance connections.
'Brisbane celebrates the young Queen Elizabeth II's arrival on her first royal tour of the commonwealth. Meanwhile the future is being shaped behind closed doors, laying the foundations for the 21st century...' (Publication summary)
'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.'
'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.'
'The title of Rodney Hall’s thirteenth novel, Vortex, means to convey something of its considerable formal and thematic ambitions. The implicit promise is that its various elements, however fragmented or disparate they may seem, will converge with the swirling inexorability of a whirlpool or a black hole. As a dynamic metaphor for the novel’s wide-ranging vision of history, the title might be interpreted as the opposite of a widening gyre, a repudiation of the terrifying prospect of mere anarchy, an affirmation of the idea that there is a shape (and indeed a gravity) to events that grants them a kind of coherence, though the fact that the ordering centre of a vortex is also the point of annihilation is hardly reassuring.' (Introduction)
'At 88, the two-time winner of the Miles Franklin award has captured the grand geopolitical tangle of 1954 in his ambitious 14th novel, Vortex'
'The title of Rodney Hall’s thirteenth novel, Vortex, means to convey something of its considerable formal and thematic ambitions. The implicit promise is that its various elements, however fragmented or disparate they may seem, will converge with the swirling inexorability of a whirlpool or a black hole. As a dynamic metaphor for the novel’s wide-ranging vision of history, the title might be interpreted as the opposite of a widening gyre, a repudiation of the terrifying prospect of mere anarchy, an affirmation of the idea that there is a shape (and indeed a gravity) to events that grants them a kind of coherence, though the fact that the ordering centre of a vortex is also the point of annihilation is hardly reassuring.' (Introduction)
'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.'
'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.'
