‘You need to think of history like a sausage’: Rodney Hall devours one momentous year in his new novel

Rodney Hall: novelist, poet, librettist, editor and actor. Vortex is his 14th novel – and maybe his best. Photograph: Charlie Kinross/The Guardian

The problem with Rodney Hall – the big, insurmountable problem – is that he is too interesting. The last time I interviewed the Queensland novelist, a “quick 30-minute chat” ballooned into a whole afternoon. Hall has a polymathic heart and stories to tell.

But this time we only have an hour. No time to ask Hall about the three years he spent walking across Europe, or the role he played in harbouring Salman Rushdie in the early 90s, or the immense, multiform scope of his art-making (take a minute and Google the man). There’s a new book to talk about: Vortex – a big, ambitious book.