Towards Zero: Philomena Van Rijswijk's The World As a Clockface

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.

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