'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)