Tuesday, 31 December 2019

A Leap of Faith


Last night, I watched a documentary about the landing on the moon in the ‘60’s.  The first two-thirds of the documentary were about the preparation and landing.  It actually brought tears to my eyes, when Neil Armstrong said the famous sentence, as he stepped down off the last rung: One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.  That surprised me, that it should be so emotive.  I’m really not like that…

I recalled sitting in class with what seemed like the whole school packed into one hot room, watching a television set with doors on it that was wheeled out for the weekly educational programmes.  I was at a Catholic girls’ secondary school, and I must have been thirteen years old.  The school was only two years old, when I started there.  It was way out the back of town.  There was a sort of creek running through the school (more gully erosion than creek), with a log across which we teetered to get to the top “ovals” (read paddocks).  We saved all the scraps from lunch-time to give to the pig farmer up the road, and we burned all the burnable rubbish in an incinerator after lunch.  We all had jobs after lunch break.  For quite a while, mine was sorting the scrap-and-rubbish-buckets, putting the scrap buckets under the building, and setting light to the contents of the incinerator.  That was fun, as we (the two of us: a girl called Marguerite and I) were allowed into class a bit late, and we also had an exclusive kind of status.  However, Marguerite’s parents threatened to sue the school when she contracted hepatitis, and, thus, ended our foray into recycling.  I also recall looking out the window, one day, and seeing a cow meandering through the schoolyard.  Dora Stewart and I ran out to chase the animal out of the school grounds, and a good time was had by all. 

My father did not believe in the Moon Landing, even at the time.  He claimed that the moon did not exist- that it was merely the reflection of the earth in space.  He said that the publicity stunt was merely to take people’s minds off the Vietnam War.  He also said that someone had come and deliberately scraped the paint off our roof, that Mum was a communist, that some of the advertisements on TV were aimed at him, and that he was on a blacklist.  You get my drift…

So, last night, much of this came back to me, watching the ungainly, boxy shape of Neil Armstrong stepping down into the dust.  There was, unfortunately, a vague sense of cynicism in my enjoyment that had never really been there before.  What was it that the conspiracy theorists claimed about the American flag?  Something about a breeze that should not have been there, blowing the cloth.  They also claimed there was some object that didn’t belong, lying on the ground, that you could discern if you magnified the image.  These notions reminded me of the Beatles’ song that was supposed to say “Ringo is dead!” if you played the LP backwards.  Conspiracy theorists are often not cynics, at all, but people who long for mystery.

Anyway, the niggling of vague doubt was completely erased as I watched the third segment of the documentary in which the three astronauts spoke of the many years that followed the moon landing.  They spoke of being changed men; they spoke of the fact that they could never look at life or the universe in the same way.  “The landing on the moon was only one day in my life”, one of them said…”the rest has been devoted to Jesus”.  He explained that he had started attending a Bible-reading group, on his return to earth, and that his newfound beliefs eclipsed that one day that was a turning-point in his life.  Another said how he remembered looking out of the Apollo and seeing the moon and the stars and thinking: “The earth, and everyone on the earth, and everything that man has made, is made of the stars…We are all one!” He told what a moving experience it was, to come to that realisation.  I do not remember which old man it was who said which words, but I was struck by the awe with which they spoke, not of the moon, but of the earth.  “Sometimes, I just go out, and go on an escalator”, one of them said, “just to have people around me.  And I think to myself: We really do live in the Garden of Eden!  All men spoke of the strangeness of being one of only two men standing on a planet uninhabited by any others; of knowing that everyone else was down there on the earth, but that they were so far away, and so alone.  One described the loneliness of this realisation, but another described the feeling as euphoric.

Thinking about the documentary, later, it struck me how ironic it was that three men could travel so far, and under such unnatural circumstances, to achieve these insights.  Listening to the wonder in their voices, seeing the openness on their faces, there was no question, in my mind, that these men had experienced something extraordinary.  The image of the Garden of Eden came up several times, and I remembered the day I came to my own epiphany.  I can’t recall what I was doing- I certainly wasn’t setting foot on any celestial body.  But I recall the sudden understanding that the Book of Genesis is not a story about the past, at all.  It is prophetic.  We are living in it right now.   



Thursday, 26 December 2019

Fleetsong (an alternative "Matesong")...


FleetSong



This year’s been tough and combusting,

But denial improves it!  (Well, just to save face)…

But Minister Dutton, he loves you,

And he’ll never budge you…(It’s all about race!)



When you need a foil to what ails ya

Call on the Libs in Australia!

A pal to deny with;

free market to buy with ;

In Aust--ayl-ya…



They can alter the news;

While they’re off on some cruise

Or rig backyard cricket…(They do hate to lose!)

Throw in some coal;

It’s as black as their soul!

They speak in dollars (except for Newstart)…



Yes, we know you love your “Mr Chips”

And your brollies! We too have our follies!

We’re dinosaurs, too!!

Negotiating border cruelty’s a shocker!

But see! We’re all chocker! They’re not what we nee-eee-ed!

(We’re chocker and they’re not what we need!)



GLORIOUS UNITED KINGDOM!
Lean on your right-wing and swingers!


They’re thick in the head;

Like burgers in bread;

Life here’s a bitch,

We’d rather be dead…



We’ll put the migrants in cubicles!

Incinerate all our marsupials!

Looking out for Number One is an LNP trait,

In Austra-aaa-alia…



YEAH!!!!

When everything’s a test!

Call ScoMo back across the o-cean!!!

Sisters and brothers

We know you think you’re above us

But deep down you begrudge us

(our Fifty Plus lotion….)



So we’ll put you right-

Cause we’re proud to be white!

Go grab your red speedos…you’re weirdos alright!!!!

Calling all Poms!

Keep on bloody invading us Austray…..leeee…..yaaaaa….

Austray-lee-ya!

(So see you in hell, then, yeah?) 

Matesong (Toursim Australia)



















Wednesday, 18 December 2019

W H Auden

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.



Santa, a modern human shaman...

Buried in the artificial cartoon image of Santa and his reindeer lie traces of ancient shamanic beliefs. The winter solstice was observed and celebrated long before Christmas became a holy day, always with colourful gifts to ward off the darkness of winter. Shamans, like our Santa, were said to travel through chimneys in their journeys to the other world. Santa, our modern human shaman, cares for the reindeer all year long, until he journeys with them into our hearts, a spirit guide to keep hope alive in us. (from "Following The Reindeer Spirit" by Linda Schierse Leonard).


Tuesday, 17 December 2019

The reindeer as spiritual messenger...

In the Arctic the shamanic peoples who live according to the rhythms of animals regard the reindeer as a spiritual messenger who travels between heaven and earth, transporting the shaman to the spirit world, where he gathers wisdom to bring back to help heal the community. The reindeer also carry the souls of the dead to the spirit world for rebirth, - from "Creation's Heartbeat, Following the Reindeer Spirit" by Linda  Schierse Leonard


A Night of Hot Quirky Shows

Dear Philomena, 
You were so wonderful the other night! Thanks for coming all that way to perform at our show.
It means a lot to us!
Warm regards. The Quirky Team
Robin, Lucy and Claire




Thursday, 3 October 2019

All the dead babies...

My best friend, Marnie, once told me about a Christmas she'd had with her extended family. The members of Marnie's family are, mostly, country people with down-to-earth ways. I met Marnie at university in 1975, when we were both eighteen, our birthdays only five days apart. I think it was during my first university holidays that I headed off to Dubbo, in NSW, to stay for a week or so with the Johnston's.
Having been brought up in an intensely private family, due to my father's schizophrenia, I loved spending time in more down-to-earth, knockabout families, in which every little facial expression or nuance wasn't examined by my mother (who might decide to exclude someone for days), or my father (who might whack or accuse you of conspiring with Communists or "the man who scraped the paint off the roof").
It was my newly-acquired boyfriend who drove me the 360kms to Dubbo. He returned the next weekend to pick me up again. I wonder if I was grateful? Possibly not. Here is a picture (a phone photo of a photo) of us standing out the front of the Johnston house...
(I made that dress from a bridesmaid's dress that I wore when I was fifteen...)

 Marnie's mum took to me, and I really liked her. Marnie told me how they used to stand around the piano while her mum bashed out tunes, and they'd sing the night away. Marnie's dad trained pacers and was the local butcher.  There is another poorly-reproduced photo of us looking cool at the Dubbo pool...

That's Marnie on the left and me on the right. 

Over the years, Marnie and I have remained close friends. We seem to catch up every couple of years or so. 

So... there was this conversation we had about Marnie's family Christmas...

"After we all had lunch, the men disappeared, and the women all went out to the kitchen to wash up and dry the dishes, and talk about all the dead babies..."  Marnie had said
.
That was the phrase that struck me: all the dead babies...

Margaret's aunties and sisters and nieces had congregated in the hot kitchen on Christmas day to somehow bring to mind, tell the stories of, and honour all the dead babies: the miscarriages, teenage pregnancies, stillbirths, no doubt some abortions, adoptions, child deaths, infertility...all the terrible tragedies that women carry silently throughout their lives.

Over the past twenty-four hours, something has occurred in my life that brought the phrase- all the dead babies- back to me, and, no! it wasn't a death, but a reminder of the pathos that runs deep through women's stories.

One of my favourite books ever is "Cross Creek", written by Marjorie Kinnan-Rawlings. She was the author of "The Yearling", which is more well-known. "Cross Creek" is based on the real story of the author's move to Florida in the 1920's to an out-of-the way creek surrounded by orange orchards, magnolia trees and hammock (swampy land). True to her era, the writer employs young African-American girls to train-up as maids in her home, and she uses the now-forbidden word for indentured slaves. However, we are all a product of our times.

There is a chapter in Cross Creek that reminds me of this tragic thread that runs through women's lives, and the way our lives are shaped around it, as though tragedy is the woof, and our lives the weave. 

"I have used a factual background for most of my tales, and of actual people a blend of the true and the imagined. I myself cannot quite tell where the one ends and the other begins. But I do remember first a place and then a woman, that stabbed me to the core, so that I shall never get over the wound of them.
The place was near the village on the Creek road, and I thought when I saw it that it was a place where children had been playing. A space under a great spreading live oak had been lived in. The sand was trodden smooth and there were a decrepit iron stove and a clothes line, on which a bit of tattered cloth still hung. There were boxes and a rough table, as though little girls had been playing house. Only opened tin cans and a rusty pot, I think, made me inquire about it, for children were not likely to carry a game so far. I was told that a man and woman, very young, had lived there for a part of one summer, coming from none knew where, and going away again with sacks over their shoulders when the autumn frosts came in.
What manner of man and women could this be, making a home under an oak tree like some pair of woods animals? Were they savage outlaws? People who might more profitably be in jail? I had no way of knowing. The Florida back country was new and beautiful but of the people I knew nothing. The wild home at the edge of the woods haunted me. I made pictures to myself of the man and woman, very young, who had come and gone. Somehow I knew that they would be not fierce, but gentle. I took up my own life at the Creek.
The answer to my wonderings was on my own grove and for a long time I did not know that it was there..." 

It turns out that the makeshift tree-home was where the author's "groundsman", Tim, had lived with young his wife. They had taken the job on the grove because of the impending birth of their young infant, but were soon keen to move back to the tree, and autonomy:

"...I only takened this on account o' the baby comin'. A woman's got to have a roof over her then. Us'll git along better thouten no house, pertickler jest a piece of a house like this un here. In the woods, you kin make a smudge to keep off the skeeters. Us'll make out."

They moved on, the proud angry man and the small tawny lovely woman and the baby. But they put a mark on me. The woman came to me in my dreams and tormented me. As I came to know her kind, in the scrub, the hammock and the piney-woods, I knew that it was a woman much like her who had made a home under the live oak. The only way I could shake free of her was to write of her, and she was Florry in Jacob's Ladder. She still clung to me and she was Allie in Golden Apples. Now I know that she will haunt me as long as I live, and all the writing in the world will not put away the memory of her face and the sound of her voice.

(The live oak, Quercus virginiana, is named "live" because it is an evergreen oak rather than a deciduous  tree as most oaks are).

It seems that this sense of tragedy was something that I learned young. Mrs Regan was a lady with long red hair, and with many children, who lived across the road from us in Blacktown. My big sister used to spend time with the eldest- Anne- and I sometimes played with Janie. I did not know what it was that Mrs Regan died from, but what I imagined, from what I'd heard, was that she had died on a blood-soaked mattress. Was that derived from something I'd overheard? I think it must have been...The thought of this neighbour dying in a pool of blood haunted me. Eventually, the husband remarried and had another tribe of children with a new wife, whose blond-haired children were cossetted, while the first Mrs Regan's children were neglected.

My own mother's three miscarriages, between our big sister and my older brother, also overshadowed our lives. My mother, still in her twenties and living in the backblocks of the western suburbs of Sydney (Quakers' Hill), would confide in my sister, whenever she thought she was pregnant. As an adult who never had children of her own, having spent the years from fourteen and forty-six in the convent, my sister had a phobia of "little things that should be big". I had a theory that her phobia originated in this early over-sharing from my mother. At the age of about eighty, my mother created a tiny rose garden as a memorial to the lost babies, which proves that getting over a miscarriage can result in more enduring grief that is usually acknowledged.
(We had this picture in the hallway when I was a child.)

Like Marjorie Kinnan-Rawlings, I have, throughout different times in my life, found myself haunted by female tragedy. Why female tragedy? Surely there is also enough male tragedy in the world to weigh a person down? I think it's because of the hidden, unspoken-of nature of the tragedies that are exclusively female... It seems that, with each of these narratives, a piece of my woman-soul has been scarred...

When I was a young woman, about to have my first child, an "older" woman (she was possibly merely thirty-five) had told me about a young woman she had come across when she was working as a Social Worker in the town where my husband and I lived. It was in the outskirts of a suburb, where the fibro (asbestos) houses were all on five-acre blocks of dead grass, bony horses and prickly-pear. Perhaps I had mentioned my interest in home-births to the other woman, in passing, although I had booked in to the local hospital, had done Lamaze classes and planned a "le Boyer" birth. Anyway, the older women had told me about the other young woman who had wanted a home-birth, but that her baby had been delivered in some shed on the doctor's land, and she had ended up "badly butchered" (to use her phrasing).

For years, the memory of that girl had haunted me. I tried to work out where the shed might have been, and, if we ever went anywhere in my husband's car, I'd check out the sheds squatting derelict in abandoned paddocks. I did not know, back then, that that kind of obsessiveness would lead me to become a writer, 'though I sometimes sat in the shade of the house, on lonely summer afternoons, writing poems, while my baby girl slept in her pram.

Years later- it would have been about twelve years later- I started taking photographs of the old sheds in the Huon Valley, in Tasmania, possibly forgetting my obsession with that original shed back in Blacktown.  


It's most likely that, subconsciously, I did remember that shed, as I started writing a novel to my sister-in-law who had committed suicide, interspersing the novel with the photos of the sheds. I had originally named it "Empty Sheds in Empty Paddocks", but eventually changed the title to "The Spinning Game". It was a novel about the ritual sacrifice of girls and young women.

I was talking to Marnie just last night, as I had shared an amazing discovery with her (which will follow shortly). She understood my obsession with the "tragedy" that we shared, as 18-year-olds, and she mentioned a Greek boy who had attended her primary school for only one year, and of how she and her friends from her childhood home-town would mention him whenever they came together. "I wonder whatever happened to xxx?" they would muse.

It was a similar story with "Erica Scholz" (name changed). Erica was a girl who had arrived at university from a country Catholic school, where she had been the school captain. By accounts, her family was strict and religious. Erica lost the plot over that first year, and we would laugh when she arrived late at lectures, one day arriving ten minutes after the lecture had finished. I remember her so clearly, as she was the sort of girl I wished I was: dark-haired, pretty, soft-looking, shorter than me...what I imagined a DH Lawrence character might look like. (I was tall, skinny, freckly...and felt "gawky"...).

Inevitably, Erica got herself a boyfriend and, basically, spent that whole year besotted and infatuated. Also, inevitably, she ended up pregnant. She suddenly disappeared from university and the story was that her "strict" parents had made her return to the country town, change her name, and give her baby up for adoption. Thus, over the years, Marnie and I have often referred to Erica. We wondered where she was, and how her life had turned out. I even went to the length of searching for her on Facebook, finding someone with her name and discovering that that Erica Scholtz lived in Germany.

For some reason, I could not let it rest, so that, a few months ago, I contacted the Historical Society in Erica's hometown (yes, I remembered it, 45 years later...). To cut a long story a bit shorter, I did track Erica down, and, in the middle of the night a few weeks ago, I received a message from her.

I cannot explain the impact this has had on me. Erica told me that she had reunited with her son when he was eighteen, and had two beautiful children from her marriage. I was so emotional. I cried for days, especially when I attempted to tell someone the story. They were, understandably, perplexed. Marnie, however, understood. She realised what a shadow Erica's story had cast over us, as young women.

My eldest daughter, aged 41, pointed something out to me, when I told her the story. I, too, became pregnant, but it was in my last year at university. On my first visit to the family doctor, his first question was: "Will you have your baby adopted?" I was in a committed relationship. We had decided to get married. Of course, I was going to keep my baby! I think that was, deep down, why Erica's situation cut so close to the bone.  It could have been me...


My first child, Heidi, aged about 18 months...

Heidi with her son, Leo...

























Thursday, 29 August 2019

...a moon-draggingly good work of fantasy worldbuilding...

Parceled into six sections comprising 67 brief, loosely connected vignettes, the contents of this volume from Australian author van Rijswijk (The World as a Clockface) form a colorful mosaic about the residents of the walled city of Luckycola, in the imaginary land of Incognita. Luckycola is home to a motley cast of characters who go about their episodic adventures, including Martina Waldesmuller, who’s incarcerated in Godown Prison; Martina’s dolly-clutching baby sister, Honeysuckle Rose; and Hadji, the local storyteller and mythmaker. Van Rijswijk imparts a fantastic quality to characters and their lives by elaborating the peculiar circumstances under which they live—for example, most of the city’s orphans are undernourished because “the country’s milk supply was diverted to the casein factory where it was used to form outer shells of lightweight pocket-grenades.” Her incantatory prose style and meticulous eye for gritty detail further amplify the strangeness of her setting, as when she writes, “In the villages, there were water-buffalo calves with ribs like corrugated iron, and there were unfed cats, and there were hens squatting in the shade cast by broken stone urns.” The author adds, “It was even said that a good storyteller could drag the full moon with the seductiveness of his tongue.” This is a moon-draggingly good work of fantasy worldbuilding. (July) 


Wednesday, 28 August 2019

Bulls, Alhambra, Grenada, evokes..Carol Patterson on House of the Flight-helpers...

Bulls, Alhambra, Grenada, evokes
for me the magical folktale nature of the beautiful and original series of stories and characters so grounded in the apocalyptic nature of Late Capitalism, with saviour from the birds that is Philomena van Rijswijk's wonderful opus House of the Flight Helpers. Do read it, not as a conventionally structured novel, but almost circular: as soon as I finished it I wanted to start again, savouring so much about it. It is also a beautifully produced book from Tartarus Press and with Ann Morgan, I believe it should win the Booker for its profound originality - it's no-one's but her own -and so beautifully crafted..




Tuesday, 27 August 2019

"From the tide pool to the stars"...-John Steinbeck

Perhaps this is the same narrowing we observe in relation to ourselves and the tide pool—a man looking at reality brings his own limitations to the world. If he has strength and energy of mind the tide pool stretches both ways, digs back to electrons and leaps space into the universe and fights out of the moment into non-conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL.


Tide Pool by Andrew Futrell

Philosophy of the Beach: Beyond the Because, John Seinbeck


“The lies we tell about our duty and our purposes, the meaningless words of science and philosophy, are walls that topple before a bewildered little ‘why’.”
– Sea of Cortez, p.171

John Steinbeck, an early ecologist...

“Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.”

– Sea of Cortez, p.178

Tuesday, 20 August 2019

Carol Patterson responds to "House of the Flight-helpers"...

Reading the House of the Flight Helpers, by Philomena van Rijswijk an amazing, original, beautifully written post apocalyptic novel, request from your library, or buy it, Philomena is another great Tasmanian writer who needs support from you, the readers.

* Carol Patterson lives in South Arm, a serene coastal hamlet south-east of Hobart, Tasmania. Her arresting style infuses her short stories with fresh, vibrant life. She explores the crucial points in people's lives when change takes place. Her post-graduate degree in Geography and Environmental Studies gained from the University of Tasmania, allows her to see the world from an original perspective, which further enriches her stories.

Anne Morgan responds to "House of the Flight-helpers"...

Reading Philomena van Rijswijk's House of the Flight Keepers. What an original, compelling, strange, satirical collection of amazements! Pure genius. My pick for the Man Booker prize, for what it's worth. And the physical book is gorgeous too. Thick paper, with its own ribbon marker.

* Anne Morgan is a full-time writer who lives on Bruny Island, Tasmania. She has published eight children’s books and one full-length volume of poetry. 
Anne has a PhD in Writing, for which she won a university medal, and a Master of Education Degree. She has worked as a journalist, public sector administrator, teacher and professional actor. 



Thursday, 25 July 2019

President for Life

In the early days, it had not been too difficult to teach the children the forbidden word, bird, to tell them the diluted story of the little clay flute, and to recall simple anecdotes from the book called Walden. But, over the years, so many things had changed, especially after President Ongresowa had been elected President for life. By that time, most children were born underweight, their intellectual growth stunted from lack of light and from malnutrition. Most of the population relied on Havnotz bread for the bulk of their diet, which was made from leaves, grass and corn husks imported from the Scenic Route and beyond.  President Ongresowa had demanded that even the smallest school should put aside the time every day for the singing of patriotic songs, dancing of stylised folk dances, and forming of human pyramids. The children had little energy for the acrobatics and flash-card demonstrations demanded by the President. Every day, after lunch break, Miss Fletcher coaxed them to rest their heads on their desks, and to close their eyes. While the children’s eyes were closed, she told them stories. Miss Fletcher understood that she must never refer to a time before the Wall or a place outside the Flightproof Netting, for the President insisted that the children must grow up without a knowledge of either. - Excerpt from "House of the Flight-helpers", Tartarus Press UK


Thursday, 4 July 2019

The Walking of the Dolls

(Excerpt from "House of the Flight-helpers" by Philomena van Rijswijk, Tartarus Press UK)


Once a year, the main street of Grenzgebiet was closed to wheeled traffic, such as trucks and carts, and the tall dolls atop their skilfully wielded stilts, would lead a parade through the town. Some of the dolls had faces as smooth and as white as porcelain, with kohled almond-shaped eyes and ridiculously long orange wigs. Others had their faces covered with leather balaclavas, their eyes and mouths suggested behind irregular gashes. On their heads they wore simple goggles. There were yellow raffia skirts and tall head-dresses made from fake palmfronds; and there were long cotton trousers and sequined capes. There was an inflatable doll sitting side-saddle on a smiling inflatable moon. The inflatable doll was always the crowd’s favourite. She was called Sybil Obedience, and for many years had represented the ideal of Productive Motherhood. On the day of the doll parade, the young woman with the most children, who at the same time had put in the most hours of paid labour, was given a small resin replica of the round-eyed pneumatic character.

Wirtschaftswunder Day

-Excerpt from "House of the Flight-helpers" by Philomena van Rijswijk, Tartarus Press, UK

‘People of the country of Incognita,’ he began. High above the square, Berisha Begari looked down from his perch two hundred metres above the cupola of the Sunshine Circus. ‘People of Incognita,’ the President repeated, suddenly made uneasy by the eerie stillness that now emanated from the enormous crowd. ‘I am your father,’ the President proceeded, suddenly unable to remember his prepared speech. ‘You are my children, and, like a good father, it is my sacred duty to protect my family from the Outsiders.’ The President stopped and waited. Usually, the word ‘Outsiders’ was a trigger for uproarious cheering and applause. This year, the President found himself gulping and running a finger around inside his collar, which suddenly felt too tight. The President cleared his throat. ‘ . . . from the Outsiders,’ he repeated. At last, someone in the front of the crowd raised an arm, and the President prepared himself for a cry of patriotism and nationalistic punching of the air. However, the cry that issued from the citizen was not Hurray for the President!, but a timid Boo! that echoed from one side of the square to the other, and was accompanied by the unexpected landing of an ovoid missile at the President’s feet.


An astonishing book...Review by Clare Rhoden

House of the Flight Helpers by Philomena van Rijswijk Tartarus Press Review by Clare Rhoden (Aurealis Magazine)

House of the Flight Helpers is a meditation on the present and the future it forebodes. In the dystopian land of Incognita, fear and loathing disrupt the natural order. Cowering inside Luckycola city, everyone lives in the shadow of the Great Wall, a barrier erected to keep out birds. Every feather that slips in invites panic: city folk suffer from a manic phobia of everything avian. Overhead, bird-proof netting separates the city from the dangerous sky. Days are dimmed and a permanent seasonal disorder prevails. But the servants of the President for Life ensure no citizen shows sadness. Oxymoronic Cheerful Federators, cold and brutal as the Stasi or the SS, prey on the citizens. Into this heartless setting, van Rijswijk introduces a swathe of pathetic but interesting characters, from Juana in the mental hospital to Honeysuckle Rose, a child plucked from home and thrust into an orphanage after her sister’s arrest. The multitude of stories within this novel produces a dense read that needs time and reflection. The convoluted narrative passes from scene to scene like a film panning over an entire continent, occasionally zooming in. The reader sees similar situations in different guises across the city. Fear, suspicion and self-preservation dominate. The President’s denial of history, like his institution of enforced celebrations, increases the weight of satire. House of the Flight Helpers is a concentrated critique of the 20th century and a resounding warning about the 21st. Humanity, in seeking to control life and bend it to human purpose, tramples over natural justice and beauty—here represented by birds. This book rewards slow reading and provides moments of poetic truth. Language is assured and the descriptions mesmerising. It is satire, elevated literary satire, that may frustrate the reader who desires solid stepping stones in plot and character development. An astonishing book of many merits for readers of intelligent dystopia.

*Aurealis is an Australian speculative fiction magazine published by Chimaera Publications, and is Australia's longest running small-press science-fiction and fantasy magazine. The magazine is based in Melbourne.