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.

One can only push such a metaphor so far before it begins to break down, which is perhaps why Vortex proposes another. It is mentioned at several points in the novel, but stated most explicitly by a Hungarian philosopher and philologist named Dr Antal Bródy, one of several European émigré characters. The English word for ‘history’, he observes, is derived from the Greek istoria, which originally denoted a web. When his interlocutor wonders if the word has something to do with ‘his story’, Bródy’s reply is blunt: ‘Not a story at all.’