The World as a Clockface By Philomena Van Rijswijk, Melbourne: Penguin, 2001, 405 pages, paperback, $19.95. Reviewed by Enza Gandolfo in the Dec 2001-Jan 2002 issue. Help more readers find out about this article
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The World as a Clockface is an epic tale set at the turn of the last century at a time, we are told in the prologue, when the world is in disarray and nothing is as it use to be. Van Rijswijk takes us from Ireland to the mythical Whalers Gate on the antipodean island of Esmania off the coast of 'the distant southern land of Incognita'. This magical but harsh landscape is immediately recognisable as Van Diemens Land and its history as our own but this is not a historical novel in the traditional sense. Van Rijswijk interweaves the real and the fantastical, the real and the magical, in the tradition of the magic realists like Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to create beguiling tales of journeys to and from this place 'at the edge of the solid world'.
Van Rijswijk lives in the secluded Hunter Valley in southern Tasmania with her five children. Her first publication, a book of poetry, Trail of Bones and Godstones, published in 1997, was followed by a novel, The Time it Rained Fish in 1999. The World as a Clockface is a rich and poetic work written with a poet's eye for detail; it is a novel where one can linger over sentences and images, where metaphors are long journeys across shifting worlds - often laced with satirist's humour:[Mrs Chomsky] felt like stone when [her husband] lay like a yellowish frog on the marriage bed, his cheeks sucked in for lack of teeth, his eyes boggling like milky marbles, his bony purple-veined hands fumbling and prodding her. andIf a childless seaman wants to father a child...he must find a place where the earth looks promising and plunge a spear into his own shadow, and his wife, far away, will conceive. That is why white men arrive in foreign countries to stick their flags into the ground. Nature is unsympathetic in this novel and the drought that lasts many years leaves both Tasmania and the mainland without water. At Whalers Gate where the ground is 'shrunken and parched like a lost man's tongue', the towns people try to stop time for a week in an effort to bring rain. But a week's sacrifice, including no sleep for the adults, brings only three minutes of rain and the three days later the ground is just as dry again. On the mainland, the Quinn family travelling with their puppet show find 'the Great Sand Sea' has covered streets in five feet of sand, dried up all the wells, left the Incognita without 'enough water for the unborn babies to swim in their mother's bellies'.
There is a subtle political edge to The Worlds as a Clockface, underlying its stories are warnings against the continued abuse of the environment and the cost of colonisation. However, Van Rijswijk's main concern is with relationship between people; between men and women, between parents and their children. Women are often restless, wanting to break free of the constraints of motherhood and marriage. When Lavina Chomsky leaves her three children after her husband's death, we appreciate that she is 'now greedy for herself' after years of 'solitary and silent panic that weighed her down', the narrative is not judgemental though, and Lavina Chomsky never becomes the 'bad' mother. Van Rijswijk sympathetically portrays the contradictions of motherhood - intense love and longing on one hand and the overwhelming need to escape the responsibility of their care on the other. It is only when she has come some way in finding herself that Lavina Chomsky is able to return for her children.
The clockface, the novel's central metaphor, represents the world, 'If I drew you a map, it would look like the face of a clock, with the South Pole at the centre', Captain Schuyler tells Lavina Chomsky as they set sail. A world as far away from Europe as it is possible to be. But the clockface is also a template for the novel, itself, a grand and circular tale, divided into four quarters and made up of many stories all concerned, as Big Jim tells Lavina Chomsky's children with a man's longing for his real home. The World as a Clockface is a novel whose narrative is driven by the characters and there are plenty of them. Whalers Gate and Incognita are peopled with eccentric characters whose lives are inevitably interconnected. There is Cleménce, the youngest daughter of 'The Stone Woman' who travels across the world to Whalers Gate with her three sisters - all nuns - and is transformed from the 'convent dummy' to 'The Wild Rose'. There is Walter Staltzkin, a Dowser who knows where to tunnel for gold and water; there are the two thousand men who drag an iceberg from the sea to form a lake on the mainland; and Lavina Chomsky the painting teacher who sits her dead husband up in the drawing room after she has washed and dressed him and runs away to sea along with her three children on Captain Holmann Schulyer's ship The King of Iceland.
However, while some characters, like Lavina Chomsky, capture our interest from the beginning others are only two dimensional - fairytale characters - that are not strong enough or complex enough to sustain our interest, this coupled with the occasional weak transitions between scenes, leaves the reader lost - forced to go back, to retrace, to find the threads of the story, - most of the time these can be found - but the rhythmic flow of the text is disrupted.
The World as a Clockface is an ambitious novel with much to be savoured and enjoyed. It is a long and enchanting journey with many detours to exotic places, via fantastical, sometimes tragic and sometimes farcical events. There are many pleasures in this novel most especially the lush sensual prose that brings to life both the real and the imagined landscapes of the Antipodes. Citation - Enza Gandolfo. 'Review: The World as a Clockface by Philomena Van Rijswijk' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), Dec 2001-Jan 2002. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 22 May 2013].
Back Cover Blurb - The people of Whalers Gate, on the Antipodean island of Esmania, claim that nothing has been the same since the turn of the century. They say that the wing of an Archangel has been seen over town, and young Sister Clemence has been beset by visions. It's been a hard winter, the women have gone sun-crazy, and the watercolour teacher, Lavinia Chomsky, has run off to sea with Captain Schuyler. Borne on a strange odyssey through mythical lands, they discover a world where time and place are distorted, so that what has been marginalised becomes central, what was once on the bottom now sits on top.
The World as a Clockface is a captivating and poetic telling of a magical, wide-ranging story, from an exciting new voice in Australian fiction.
Have You Also Read? Calendar Boy
 Andy Quan, Sydney: Penguin, 2002, 240 Pages, Paperback, $22.00Reviewed by Simmone Howell in the July 2002 issue.Whoever said there are only five stories in the world was pushing it. In Andy Quan's debut collection Calendar Boy, sixteen short stories fall into each other so completely that ultimately it seems Quan only has one story: it's about a youngish, insecure, Asian-Canadian gay guy and his search for love and acceptance in the modern world. Neal Drinnan's blurb suggests that Quan writes of open wounds and allows the reader a bit of a poke around -- but this reviewer got the feeling that the author was holding something back. Calendar Boy reads more like a memoir than fiction. If it were a film you could imagine the opening scene (ah, those clean, cigarette-butt free streets of Toronto) complete ... read more.
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