Gould's Book of Fish

This is a tragicomic, grotesque, fantasmagoric story of a convict in an early 19th century prison colony on Sarah Island in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania). It's an effective approach for showing the horror of the genocide of the native population, the rape of the land, and the lunacy of Rabelaisian-like British characters untethered from the (relative) sanity of their home society, without making readers want to kill themselves after reading it.

If I saw this description before reading the book, I'd never have picked it up, but I'm glad I did. What kept me reading was the genius of the writing. It's hard to pick one sample, but here's one that speaks to the nature of the book itself:

Because, you see, it sometimes seems so elusive, show more this book, a series of veils, each of which must be lifted and parted to reveal only another of its kind, to arrive finally at emptiness, a lack of words, at the sound of the sea, of the great Indian Ocean through which I see in my mind's eye Gould now advancing towards Sarah Island, now receding; that sound, that sight, slowly pulsing in and out, in and out.
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Six-word review: Elaborately realized fantasy of self-emancipation.

Extended review:

When I see that a book is good, meaning well written and (according to my best understanding) successful in accomplishing what it set out to do, but I just don't happen to like it very much, I have a hard time writing a review. I've had that problem a few times lately, and here it is again.

It's hard to say why this novel didn't appeal to me. The subject matter is not at all pretty, consisting as it does primarily of the narrator's account of life in a brutal prison environment peopled by some remarkable characters: the Surgeon, the Commandant, Twopenny Sal. Yet there is a strange beauty in the language of Flanagan's descriptions, fluid and brilliant as show more painted fish. A filmy veil of delusion or hallucination seems to overlay the storyline, giving it a dreamlike quality even as the horrific details nail it in reality like spikes in flesh. In most cases (and for me The Enchanted is a recent five-star example) this level of authorial skill is enough to trump any revulsion at subject matter, just as so many paintings of tortured saints rank with great art.

Yet something simply didn't work for me here; or perhaps I was after all not quite receptive enough. I can't say that I was put off by the colored ink of the body text, but it did sound a gimmick alarm in my mind; instead of enhancing the effect, for me, it became something of a distraction that I had to overcome.

There is a stratum of historical fact underlying this extraordinary work of fiction. The paintings that head each chapter are the actual work of one William Buelow Gould, convict, whose imprisonment in an island penal colony in Tasmania in the mid-nineteenth century is a matter of record. If anything, that factual basis and surrounding documentary detail make this product of artistic imagination seem even more fantastic than it would if it had been sheer invention.

The very notion of wrapping a complex surrealistic narrative around a series of fish paintings would tax the inventive powers of some authors to the limit, but for Flanagan it's only the beginning. It is a sure credit to the author's seductive storytelling that the leap at the end carries us with him across another dimension.

The narrator quotes Erasmus (page 252): "The reality of things depends solely on opinion." This is the faceted crystal that reflects in rainbows throughout the text.

It's for books like this that I try to maintain a clear separation in my mind between "I like it" and "it's good" (a distinction that also leaves me free to dote on things that aren't terribly excellent), even though I don't think it's possible to achieve objectivity in judging a creative work. I'll call this book very good and leave the loving of it to others. show less

Sometimes the buzz surrounding a book crashes through my everyday. Such is the case with "Gould's Book of Fish," a story ultimately about the brutal strength of empire and the truly callous way science applied itself in the service of accepted wisdom in the 19th century.

The prison surgeon, an obese, self-absorbed, and manically ambitious individual, assigns Billy Gould, a small-time forger and crook, the job of painting the various species of fish caught by the surgeon and others. Additionally, the camp's commandant, himself an impostor wearing a gold mask, is skimming funds from the government to build a new city-state in this island off the coast of Tasmania. Well, the surgeon, who wanted to advance the art of Enlightenment show more classification, is killed and eaten by his pet pig and becomes "the largest pig turd on the planet." The commandant, too, comes to an appropriately ghastly end. But these plot particulars do not begin to inform you about this remarkable, outrageous outlier of a book. Flanagan blesses his reader with a very healthy dose of the outlandish, the impossible. There is an ultimate metamorphosis in the book which I will not spoil. The triumph of the book for the author is in its unbelievably inventive plot devices and prose. The triumph for the reader and the main character is the final transcendence over the Enlightenment's compunction to classify everything (including aboriginals as sub-human), and the madness of Britain's imperial and penal systems.

Oh my gosh! If you've missed this one so far, you should definitely open it up. Its plot elements may not be for everyone, but the theme of man's inhumanity etc. etc. is universal.

http://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2010/07/goulds-book-of-fish-novel-in-twelve.h... show less

Dear reader, if you decide you want to read this book, I have one burning hot tip for you: don't read The Fatal Shore immediately before it. Friends and wife told me this book was dark, disturbing etc... which it certainly would have been had I *not* been reading FS at the same time. But I was. So many of the dark incidents in Flanagan's novel are taken almost verbatim from Hughes' history that I couldn't really take them seriously the second time round.

This points to a larger problem for Gould's, for me at least: the book is so obviously built from other books. The Fatal Shore is the most obvious, but also, for instance, Ulysses, Heart of Darkness, Moby Dick, the poems of Rilke, Buddhist texts (definitely) and, possibly, Blood show more Meridian. So my reading experience consisted almost entirely in train-spotting of a fairly uninteresting variety.

That said, I'm still an academic at heart, so:

* Like Ulysses, Gould's is overly structured. Each chapter has at the very least a governing fish, a governing character, a governing characters and, to some degree, a governing style. Do you find this kind of thing interesting? I do so decreasingly.

* Like Rilke and various Buddhist texts, there's a lot of stuff here about escaping from being human, searching for immediate experience and essentially just wanting to be a rock, because rocks don't do anything (or, at the very least, don't do anything wrong). (Also, there are *direct quotes from Rilke*. The anachronisms aren't crippling, but the tiresomeness of writing from the perspective of a non-literary type who is obsessed by Wordsworth and Rilke... well, just write from the perspective of a literary type if you want to do that).

* Like every other book you've ever read, Gould's involves a lot of stuff about how love will save us all blah blah blah. Odd that it never works, even in books. Almost as if love wasn't actually enough to save anyone, but that the thought that it were is enough to salve the consciences of wealthy Westerners.

* Like Moby Dick in the USA, Gould's is an allegory of Australian history. This is more my style. Less my style are the magical realist elements, but I accept that that is just subjective opinion. If you like magical realism, you'll probably like this--it's the Australian version: these aspects of Australian history (so the story goes) are unspoken, and (the book implies) can best be brought to the surface by allegorical/surrealist style. The fact that the book retells much of the story of the Fatal Shore kind of puts a dent in this, but for an Australian at least, it's fun to imagine that our history is important enough to require literary attention.

* Like every postmodern book you've ever read, there's lots of recursiveness here. I don't find that particularly interesting in this case--the novel stands without it, and it adds nothing other than the obligatory "oh, literature, it's so unreliable" garbage (really? because I thought literature was a scientific observation of sub-molecular reality!), but perhaps you will.

But I'm in quite a bind, because what I think is most valuable about the book is its willingness to deal with major intellectual and historical questions. The style is a bit tour-de-forcish, rather than being really enjoyable; the structure, as I said, is externally imposed and adds little. But the ideas are well worth thinking through.

I was worried, I confess, when we got the dull "oh, I'm just a character in a book, I have to destroy the book because words and art are just so constricting of my natural immediate experience" stuff. And I was very upset when this was somehow combined with the "love will save us all" stuff.

But then, so close to intellectual disaster, Flanagan saves his novel in the last few pages: Gould admits that these two positions are completely contradictory--that love is fundamentally human and cultural, not natural. And yet Gould *feels* them both. That's interesting.

So, I'm not sure this is the masterpiece so many people claim, but I am sure it was well worth reading, and I'm excited by Flanagan's ambition. From what I can tell, his recent award winner is, well, not so ambitious. show less

Gould is possibly the most untrustworthy narrator ever created, but he is all we have, and he is so damn compelling that we just make do. He has been exiled to Australia for at least one of a variety of real or mistaken crimes (including forgery, murder, sexing up the wrong people, and disrespecting the flag). And when he eventually is sentenced to the worst and most isolated prison on the rough west coast of Tasmania, he is mistaken by the prison surgeon as an artist, and commissioned to paint realistic drawings of the fish that are brought up in the colony nets for a scientific project in England. Even though he is not really an artist, he likes the small perks that come with the position, and goes with it. At first hating the fish, show more then loving them, and eventually merging with them completely.

This book has a Tristram Shandyness about it, mixed with a huge dose of colonialism and fishy philosophy. The narrative is at once loose and unconventional, and tightly constructed and satisfying. Absolutely worth checking out.

[full review here: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2009/10/goulds-book-of-fish-2001.html ] show less

There are times when, as a book reviewer, it is tempting to simply put the adjectives on hold; when mere descriptors seem paltry next to the indescribable beauty of the book itself. Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish is that kind of book. Reading it open mouthed, gasping at the richness and complexity of the text that clearly defies categorisation and classification, one feels intimately connected, while in awe of what the author has produced. Gould's Book of Fish is a serious read; one of those desert island books you can read again and again and find still more meaning in its strange depths; both confirmation and destruction of those things you believe in (and cannot articulate). The book simultaneously makes a mockery of show more language, history, love, and humanity, while celebrating, and even immortalising them, much as Joyce's Finnegans Wake, or Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury did for the last century, although with a more straightforward storyline. Both Joyce and Faulkner are celebrated in the novel, as are other great authors from history such as Flaubert, Hugo, Blake, Keats, Cervantes, Sterne, Wordsworth, Pope, Borges, Voltaire, and Conrad.For all of the shifts in Gould's Book of Fish, with things like time, history, identity, and power all variable, there are some constants, and this is the basis on which the book is built. Love is one of those constants. Another is its corollaries, racism, brutality, and hatred - clear and obvious evils. A third and more subtle constant is that sense of the mysterious beauty in life, and the world: "The knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary - how am I to resolve them?" Ultimately, as Gould says, this is a book about life, not death, and despite the inherent sadness, the brutality, the grossness, and the torture, what remains with the reader is how we ultimately escape with Gould; how the love, beauty, and even the story, remains, shining and glorious. In its gorgeous use of language, its extraordinary structure, its ambitiously realised depths, and above all, the magic it works on its reader, Gould's Book of Fish is a masterpiece. Read it for the interesting story, and find yourself, like Hammett, lost in its labyrinth depths, obsessed, changed forever, and your unrequited love of literature both challenged, and invigorated. show less

My first Richard Flanagan novel, and I doubt it will be my last. I listened to the audiobook, superbly narrated by Humphrey Bower. Next time I read this it will have to be the standard print - not because I didn't love Bower's narration, but because it's the sort of book where you need to flip backwards (and probably forwards) to try to understand it better.

This is a work of fabulous imagination, rooted in Australia's dark past, at once a fantasy and an expansive philosophy. There are few likeable characters, yet we can see something of ourselves in many of them. I was initially attracted to the book because it is set, in part, in the harsh convict prison of Sarah Island, Tasmania. I read a lot of Australian history, and I'm lucky show more enough to have been to Sarah Island. But the island of the book is barely recognisable - and therein lies the first of the author's many fabrications. Flanagan descriptions are convincing and utterly believable: yet when he tips reality on its head we wonder why we didn't see it coming.

This is a book that will surprise, disgust, engage and move the reader: most authors would be happy enough to achieve just one of these! show less