Philomena van Rijswijk - a strange and satirical narrative, a mythological mosaic of horrors, feather phobias, dead saints, clay flutes, terrible birds, Border Monkeys, forbidden zones and unsettling forebodings

Philomena van Rijswijk, House of the Flight-helpers, Tartarus Press, 2019.
www.taswriters.org/writers/philomena-van-rijswijk/




This brilliant new dystopian novel is a strange and satirical narrative, a mythological mosaic of horrors, feather phobias, dead saints, clay flutes, terrible birds, Border Monkeys, forbidden zones and unsettling forebodings.


"The people of Incognita have walled themselves in..."
House of the Flight-helpers by Tasmanian author Philomena van Rijswijk is a strange and satirical narrative, a mythological mosaic of horrors, feather phobias, dead saints, clay flutes, terrible birds, Border Monkeys, forbidden zones and unsettling forebodings. It casts the reader into the future, a future left trammelled by the glacial passage of xenophobia and exclusion. It is a parable of sorts, and considers the biggest questions and insecurities of our age, one of the most poignant of which is: when we exclude the outsider, are we, in fact, imprisoning and impoverishing ourselves?


ALONG the eastern seaboard of an unnamed continent the authorities have built a wall. The city sprawls along the coast beaten by the mush-brown sea, protected from outsiders or invaders and, most important of all, from anything which flies. The city is shrouded with high nets, constantly repaired by men who no longer fish. The nets are covered in guano and corpses, the city below made murky by the myriad dead birds.
The citizens, the occupants of the city, have few rights and less knowledge. They are terrified of any creature with feathers. Bird is a banned word and the sound of gulls brings horror. At night the untouchable caste of Cheerful Federators cleans every comb and barbule from the streets. They sweep up anyone out past curfew: abandoned children, dying elders, the rebel too absorbed in his graffiti to notice the dark. Such sinners are dispatched to the orphanage, the Mental Wing or the subterranean Godown Prison. They disappear and few, if any, ever return.
Beyond the city wall stretches the terrible Inland, a massive desert of heat and sand, though at its very centre is rumoured to be a place of sweetness and calm. Predators and vermin roam out there, to be avoided at all costs.
Of course, all walls look different from the other side. The long construction bars the way to the sea for the roaming Camel Wallahs, Blue Wallcreepers, Wallachs and other mysterious continental denizens. For them, the loss of the cities has brought economic collapse to match environmental destruction. Nomads wander a barren, hostile landscape collecting goods for the teeming markets and shanty towns lined against the outside, the downside, the unknown side of the wall.
Some find or stumble upon ways to penetrate the wall and face the dangers of the outside. (No-one is coming the other way, into the lucky privileges of the chosen few.) A message is carried: it is cold…we have no blankets. All routes are circuitous, perplexing, accompanied by fable and myth. Bird-tracks in the dust are as legible, as meaningful, as human words. Eventually, inevitably, the wall is breached. The tyrant falls and a young, wise, enigmatic man tears up that mantle to begin again, to make something different.
 A life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details[1]
Don’t let my description suggest that this is a linear novel. It is a series of fragments, pieces of news from nowhere. The city finds echoes in the streets of Hav of the Myrmidons; Inland is the antonym of Le Guin’s Valley. Stories come and go, meander through the dried wadis, in and out of sad villages and past infants left to starve until adopted by birds. A child plays in a gutter till she is swept away, reunited with her lost sister fifty tales later after circumnavigations and drowning.
[1] Ursula Le Guin The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
House of the Flight-helpers is a palimpsest of fragments and scraps, halting tales and tortured myths. Half-remembered stories, which you, the reader, rework so that when this character or that symbol re-emerges you are no longer sure of its history or freight. The form mirrors a fractured place, a land of erasure and retelling, broken by its mysterious past.
Reading the book, itself a delightful object, is like following the news of a distant war, hard and unrelenting. In many ways, it is indeed the telling of the aftermath of conflict, what is left when the men ride away to die under black flags, when the fish no longer come and the ravaged soil provides no crops.  It is a long time before we find any possibility of salvation.
Van Rijswijk manages the complexity of dystopia beautifully. Each page bristles with unlikely details, strange insights into the horror within and outside the city colliding with beauty, with trust and the possibility of connection. Sentences carry great weight, repaying close reading to quarry out the references and possibilities they contain.
On recovering their ability to use the word blue, the people of the valley of broken dreams became ‘free to remark on the ethereal hue of an infant’s eyes, and the three most tenuous emotions – joy, nostalgia and sadness – ran free and unfettered in the veins and arteries of the restored men and women of that blessed place.’
La esperanza es lo último que se pierde[1]
In the end, the ducks return. The lake of stillness at the heart of things is in the city itself. ‘Mankind’s endless and insatiable need for some glimmer of hope[2]’ feeds the possibility of change. The horrifying reality van Rijswijk imposes upon us is the uncertainty of permanence. We are left unsure: if solutions are only ever temporary, maybe hope is condemned to be illusory,
We, the readers, inevitably know that here in our present world, walls are being rebuilt and continents re-partitioned. Resource wars driven by climate change are underway. These present problems are already daunting. The House of the Flight Helpers shows that after the apocalypse we will continue to hope. The author suggests that there is a horror in optimism; in the face of knowledge, hope itself is torture. Even so, the terror remains that hope will die and not return.
[1] Spanish proverb, translated as hope dies last.
[2] P 281, first edition - SARAH TANBURN
www.horla.org/house-of-the-flight-helpers-by-philomena-van-rijswijk-reviewed-by-sarah-tanburn/



Philomena van Rijswijk, The World as a Clock-face, Penguin, 2001.

Things just aren’t right in the world. The people of Whalers Gate are trying to stop time, Mrs Chomsky has gone to sail around the antarctic circle with a complete stranger, Nine Toes’; three ill children are waiting for him in their Amazonian tree house, the desert is closing in on the people of Incognita, there are dead birds all over the ground, and the women are turning into skeletons, or turning to stone. Welcome to the world of magic realism, where anything is possible. Time is distorted, and the unreal seems commonplace, as the characters battle their natural adversaries without the usual constraints of logicality. Following in the footsteps of the early Carey, Borges, Marquez, de Bernieres, and Fowles, Van Rijswijk uses her knowledge of the sea, and her antipodean base of Tasmania, to create a unique voice, taking the reader on a descriptive journey from the mythical antipodean island state of Esmania, past a small island to the east called Aotearoa, Antartica, Tierra del Feugo, Paraguay, the Cape of Africa, and back to the Antipodean mainland Incognita. This often convoluted tale is sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and sometimes bizarre, but always compelling. The World as A Clock Face is Van Rijswijk’s second novel, starting its life as a series of short stories, a structure which is still apparent, as the stories weave through the extraordinary cast of characters, forming an eternal life of their own, moving amongst the strange terrain, in and out of the pursed lips, the hot jungle nights and cold Antarctic days.
There are few constants in this novel, but the recently thawed Lavinia Chomsky, and her three children, Snowy, Albion, Blanche, along with the grey-whiskered old salt Captain Schuyler, Sister Mary Sacrum – also known as Missy Scarem Scarem, the beautiful Aggie Winterbottom and her daughter Darkie Sweet, the Quinns, also known as The Merry Skylarkers, and Big Jim Narracoopa seem to reappear most often, moving through the changing terrain. The novel is peopled with imaginatively named eccentrics, and although not all of the characters take on the depth of Mrs Chomsky, the Thoreaus, the other sisters, Stylus and Septum, Fetchit Wildermann, Porgy Piggins, the Indian prince and his musical entourage, the Grinsards, Dona Immaculata, Concepcion, Don Miguelo de la Corpus, Annunciata, Walter Stalzkin, Vwaselest, Epifyta, Manenko, Tweelingzuster and Terranara, Liddle Puddin, and the Sargassum children, are among many of the people who move in and out of the novel, teasing us with their fascinating tales and then slipping away to make room for the next one. Some of the stories end suddenly, and we never find out what happens with the people we have lived with for 20 or so pages; Walter Stalzkin’s search for the Laws of Nature, Nine Toes’ family as they partake of their dead, Vwaselest, Epifyta, the Indian prince, all drawing us in and then leaving us, such is life in this mystical part of the world. The dreams of these characters, along with their mythologies, stories and the everyday detail which makes up their lives form the backdrop for the novel, fusing the everyday with the fantastic, the nightmarish with the waking, and blurring the distinctions between seriousness and triviality, tragedy and comedy, the horrific with the ludicrous.
There are a number of themes pulling the chaos together, particularly ice, time, air, water, and the feminine versus masculine. The ice appears throughout the novel, looming large, as Antarctica, the centre of Van Rijswick’s map. The unmoving point of the South Pole around which the stories and life move, “fly or fishtail past on their long long journey around the world” (404). Point zero. There is the king of Iceland, the ship which drives the novel forward, on which the storytelling takes place, where the characters meet between ports, magical islands, circling the antarctic seas.
There are icebergs, the white mountain which Serafina dreams of, the ice floes of the antarctic seas, the blue ice water of the polar melt, which stops rust, mould and rot. There is the ice which provides its own eerie light, the light that is “so strange, thicker than darkness”, that blue glow called the “Light of Civilisation”, and distorts reality, creating phantoms and demons. Most importantly, there is the ice we carry around inside of us. The ice of an unlived life. There is Livinia Chomsky’s icy interior, “cold as white marble”, as she lies next to her husband. There is the white continent inside Violet Offenbach, as the “grains of snow like powdered glass that fell slowly, constantly, all day and all night, leaving a sandy covering of ice that was glassy and hard” (158), freezing herself after losing her Indian drummer. And, there is the iciness of stone, the living death which becomes a real death of Aloyshus, Clemence’s mother, who wakes each morning with icicles hanging from her nose and eyelids, and who wills her molecules to freeze, her hair becoming the fibres of blue asbestos.
The inner ice is connected to time “a frozen river that began somewhere outside” and flowed inward; a black river with the mute stubbornness of ice, pushing its way between the frozen sheets of her inner continent, shifting the layers, flowing inexorably under its own great weight”. The people of Whaler’s Gate try to stop time, thinking that perhaps this might trick the weather into returning to its normal rain patterns. They hold a dull poetry recital, forbid eating between meals, avoid sleeping, music, dancing and singing in an effort to make time slow down, but as Sister Mary Septum states, time isn’t like that: “She’d been asleep. Yes! – That was when she realised that her whole life she’d been trying to stop time, but had only managed to stop herself. no matter how much you manage to stop yourself, time will never put itself out to stop for you.” Time is an illusion. The characters grow old, and die and appear again in the stories, their lives spiraling in a distortion of linearity. The ship moves forward, the children tell their stories to their children, and time marches on, an immutable law of nature.
The laws of nature are a masculine principle in this book, but the feminine is a strong one. The men try to stop time, but the women know that the children need feeding, that crops need sowing. “Wasn’t a woman born with time crammed into her very bones like marrow” (151). They have an inner knowledge. There are stories of atrocities to women, Gabriel’s “I will teach you what you are”, or Manenko’s many stories of how women were hurt. The women dream the great dreams, linked to the earth: (110) “A woman’s most wayward dreams, you see, are inseparable from the tides, great and small; from the merciless deluges of spring; from the air that spins lazily away to the stars; from the tannin-stained swelling of rivers; and from the long arid times when all things wither into a tissue of opalescence and then turn to dust. Mrs Chomsky talks to the children about the fluid medium in which we live, the air, the water”. There is always the bigger picture, reminding us of the animals we are, dwelling on the bottom of our earth, “just as the seas has bottom-dwelling creatures”. The women can change, metamorphosis into stone, into bird, into missionary, mother, cold and hot. While the masculine seeks to contain the environment, to leave their flags in the land, to take possession or control, sometimes with good effect, as the prophet Willi Willi does, the women knows of the inevitability of time: “Annunciata wondered how Senor Stalzkin could think that the Laws of Nature might be housed somewhere in such a place – a rioting jungle hovering overa white desert and a bleeding dead river” (308).
Despite the death, the aching, the tragedy, the novel is filled with humour. There are little asides, quips about the Esmanians: “Applechewers, othersiders”, or the blackly humorous interchange between Violet’s parents as they talk about the baby Violet must be incubating inside her: “It might have webbed feet – with the tongue of a lizard – scales on its back – bring a curse on our family for seven generations- stink of ghee and fenugreek” interspersed with peeling potatoes, slicing beans and stirring custard and mowing the lawn. There is the native’s vision of Stalzkin, Falisi-zm “man of the large penis”, as he thrusts his arrow into the Island of the Gods, marking it as his own. There are the names of the missionaries: Kingdom Cummings Poe-Bird, Olly Ghoost, Willby Dunne, General Sturmund Drang, or the natives response to Mary Sacrum’s explanations of how the Lord loves all men: “So, we’ve had such men – but they were not allowed to marry, They were chosen to be priests.”(177)
Despite the gorgeous use of language and the originality of this novel, there are also a few minor problems. The metaphors are constant, coming thick and fast, and while they are always original, and good, piled on top of one another they can be hard to take, their heaviness diluting each other. In the space of a single paragraph, the sun comes to the door of the tent like “a mother in law snooping under things”; the leaves of the trees in the garden are “like the curved wings of green parrots fleshed out with light”; and an orange flower is “like a burning torch”. The imagery is lush, with rich descriptions of the flora and fauna of Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica, South America and Africa, and it just isn’t necessary to have so much additional metaphor. Also there are perhaps too many stories. It is difficult to keep track of the many threads woven into the tale and at times threatens to turn the whole novel into chaos. Characters come and go, and occasionally details will be left out, such as the fate of Violet’s first Indian baby, minor characters with fantastic names coming and going with such pace that it is easy to forget who is who. However, despite these faults, the novel is still a good one, filled with fascinating stories, interesting words and a style which is quite original. The perspective is a challenging one and forces the reader to look differently at time, space, history, and most of all, the map, oriented as it is on the southern pole, moving around in a clockwise motion. Spiraling inwards. Towards zero. - Magdalena Ball
www.compulsivereader.com/2003/03/22/philomena-van-rijswijks-the-world-as-a-clockface/


Philomena van Rijswijk's third book is set in Esmania, a triangular island off the larger land mass of Incognita and is concerned with the wanderings of Mrs Lavinia Chomsky and her three pale children. The central metaphor of the narrative is the redrawing of the world as a disk with the South Pole at the centre and surrounded by the Southern Ocean, the 'silent, phantom world of ice and snow.' ('If I drew a map, it would look like the face of a clock, with the South Pole at the centre,' said Captain Holmann Schuyler). Mrs Chomsky runs away from the boredom of marriage and a small island and travels the seas with Captain Schuyler, in the ship, The King of Iceland. She has many adventures and tells and hears lots of wondrous tales.
This is the fabulous world of magic realism where cruelty, death and love rub side by side with the extremes of the natural world. There is much that will be familiar to Tasmanians, especially the preoccupation with the sea, whaling and boats; as well the fact that many of the stories are based on Tasmanian history and myth. However, as the book goes on, the stories get stranger and more bizarre as when the Whaler's Gate puppeteers wander off to the desert in search of husband and sons and find an iceberg mountain that has been dragged from the southern ocean and causes the dry land to blossom as it melts.
The book structure is divided loosely into four quarters, beginning with what appears to be the late nineteenth century. Van Rijswijk says the motif is the sea and 'the sea carries the story around [so that] ... the stories are circular.'
The prose is rich, beautifully written and van Rijswijk leaves the weirdness of the plot without adornment, to tell the story. This is very effective and gives the writing a power of its own. Like most writing of the fabulous, character development is simple and the reader is left in no doubt as to the motives of individuals. The strange names of the characters (Day-Lea Bread, Mocassins Thoreau and Darkie Sweet) are self-explanatory and allow the peculiarities of plot to develop without interruption.
The World as a Clockface is a world where women and children are predominant and the pursuit of love, birth, the suckling of children and sometimes animals, is the main preoccupation. But then, this is a world that what has been marginalised, becomes central and what was at the bottom, now sits on top.
This is a fairly long book but the prose carries the reader along on often, beautifully understated writing, that is lighthearted, amusing and frequently joyful. There is much to enjoy and discover in the telling.
Philomena van Rijswijk grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney and in 1984 moved with her husband and children to Tasmania. She lives near Cygnet and now writes full time. She has published a book of poetry, Trail of Bones and Godstones and a novel, The Time it Rained Fish with Esperance Press.
It is exciting to observe the journey of a writer who was first nurtured and published by a small community press. - ELIZABETH DEAN
https://walleahpress.com.au/FR23Dean.html





Philomena van Rijswijk, The time it rained fish, Esperance, 1999.


The story of two soul sisters separated by over a century of time and half the world. But linking them are three generations of Irish Australian women. The culmination occurs in Tasmania where the landscape is alien to both and yet permits the impossible: their meeting.

A beautifully written and haunting story of two soul sisters. The first Ellen is a Carmelite nun, born near Skibbereen in Ireland during the Great Hunger. The second Ellen is a New Age convert of the 1970's and 1980's, born in the arid western suburbs of Sydney, New South Wales. The emotional centre of gravity is their Irish Catholicism; and the book moves back and forth between eras that link their personal lives with the issues of land rights and Republicanism in Ireland and Australia. Each section begins with a stanza of Irish poetry.

Philomena van Rijswijk, Bread of the Lost, Walleah Press, 2012.


"This is a poetry of desire that shocks but leads to a personal freedom, from the innocence of childhood to the pluralism of womanhood"


Philomena van Rijswijk’s poetry is such a sensual treat.  As with her fiction, there seems to be no topic off-limits; no intimacy she isn’t willing to explore.  The poetry moves across a wide range of themes, but all of the poems are charged with emotive power, mixed imagery and rich textures, so heady at times, that breaks for breath are needed.  All of the senses are engaged.
The poetry invites the reader to partake of the Bread of the Lost, suggested by the title: each poem a kind of nutritional offering.  The title poem, “Páin Perdú” epitomizes the multiple meanings and textures inherent in all of the poems. Normally Páin Perdú refers to a kind of French toast made of stale (‘lost’) bread that is re-found through frying the bread in egg custard.  In van Rijswijk’s poem the bread becomes symbolic of many different things through her extended metaphors, the most prevalennt being love and desire not fully consummated. This bread leaves the speaker choking, dying of hunger despite the bread that is lodged in the throat:
I am dying from a lump of spoiled bread
Turned to lead in my slender throat:
A bland wadge of hopefulness,
Wedged like a lump of loaf
Cast aloft by a careless hand. (55)
Through the alliteration there is irony, transfiguration, nourishment and hunger all working together towards the denouement.  In this case, the “bread” is no longer recovered (though it is a leftover scrap of love), but instead becomes poison, a means to death, yet still exquisite.
In nearly all of the poems, the subject and object perform a dance where roles are reversed, aligned, torn, and reconfigured, always with a kind of skewed nourishment, as in “Strangled Collision” where the bread is the love object, imbibed and absorbed like wine and grains of rice, crushed down in a Strangler Fig embrace:
I could be the gulping throat, and he could be the bright,
Unripe wine. (43)
In addition to bread, there is also music that runs, literally in pizzicatos, the sad song of a silent phone, the scream of cicadas, an infant whine, “squealing strains and squawks”, mournful keens and croons, flamenco, the percussion of a “three-mile goods-train”, bass drone, sleep-crazy jazz on the radio, and also figuratively in the rich internal rhythms of the poetry.
The book is full of visuals as well, from the artwork of Degás to the constant patterns of the natural world – the garden, the earth, the backyard, the house, the kitchen, the bed, the beach.  Nature is continually flying, buzzing, growing and transforming throughout each poem against a tapestry of colours (blue-green, aquamarine, celandine) and images.
Finally, there are smells – fecund flowers and the “stink of subterranean ooze”, fermenting milk, “the salt-sweet, tadpole smell”, sleep-breath, and sticky molasses. Beyond the sensuality, the poems manage to be simultaneously timeless and rooted in modernity.  Greek myths and legends (Odysseus, Hades, Baba Yaga, Our Lady of Sorrows) and bucolic scenes sit comfortably with Google Earth, mobile phone settings, Dr Who’s Tardis, and ticking clocks.
The setting of many of the poems is the human body. It is here that the structure of many of the poems are mapped, once again playing between the subject and object; first and third person. The belly, the womb, the ==buttocks, the heart, the hands, breasts, thighs, lips, eyes, and even the feet all become the backdrop to the emotions pouring out through the poems:
I know your feet:
Sheep-milk-pale and fine-tuned,
The catgut of tendons tightened
To the ramulka’s jagged pitch. (“And a White Flower”, 52)
Above all the poetry in Bread of the Lost is rich.  Moving between desire, hunger, overwhelming beauty and hideous loss, there is an underlying, unapologetic intensity in every one of these poems. van Rijswijk is able to take the most ordinary of experiences – the drinking of a cup of tea, waiting by a telephone, or perusing a book of pictures – and turn it into a dance of life that flirts at the edge of death.  Bread of the Lost is a beautiful and moving collection that can be plundered and indeed eaten whole or tasted in small sweet mouthfuls like exquisite arsenic kernels. - Magdalena Ball
www.compulsivereader.com/2013/06/09/a-review-of-bread-of-the-lost-by-philomena-van-rijswijk/





A conversation with Philomena van Rijswijk
Philomena van Rijswijk: | To her mother’s country (story)

















Philomena van Rijswijk lives in Tasmania, the ‘south island’ of Australia. Her last novel, The World as a Clock-face, was published by Penguin. Her poems and short stories have been published in collections and literary journals in Australia, Ireland and India. The author’s work was included in Best Australian Stories 2002 (Black Inc) and Best Australian Poetry 2005 (UQP). Some of her stories have been translated into Hindi by Dr Aruna Sitesh and published in Delhi. Her poetry collection, Bread of the Lost, was published by Walleah Press in 2013. In 2016, she was awarded the Masterton District Fellowship, spending three weeks at the New Zealand Pacific Studio at Mt Bruce in New Zealand. Philomena lives alone with her two budgerigars, Neftali and Mathilde, in the south east of the island.  She has five adult children and eight grandchildren.