Gould's Book of Fish

"My wonder upon discovering the 'Book of Fish' remains with me yet." Richard Flanagan's opening line may resonate with readers as they polish off the final sentence of his novel "Gould's Book of Fish." The "Book of Fish," a book within the book, is discovered in a junk shop by Sid Hammet, an amiable con man in Tasmania, who makes a sort of living ("if it wasn't that good, nor was it all that bad") bilking porky American tourists by selling them old crap marketed as "antiques." Digging through a pile of ratty-tatty women's magazines, Hammet finds a book that positively glows, I tell ya -- a frenzied narrative interspersed with fabulous watercolors of sea life. Upon opening this dizzying mad rush of a book, Hammet is hooked! "It was, I must admit, a dreadful hodgepodge, what with some stories in ink layered higgledy-piggledy over others in pencil, and sometimes vice versa. Upon running out of space at the end of the book, the writer seemed to have simply turned it around and, between the existing lines, resumed writing -- in the opposite direction and upside down -- more of his tales. ... The sum of such chaos was that I seemed to be reading a book that never really started and never quite finished." He takes his find to be appraised by historians and publishers and experts who judge the book a very colorful fraud -- a fish story, as it were -- "the insignificant if somewhat curious product of a particularly deranged mind of long ago." That mind belongs to William Buelow Gould, a convict sentenced to Van Diemen's Land. Some of you may recognize from imperial history the name of an infamous British prison colony. Some of you may have just heard the U2 song. Gould's story becomes an obsession for Hammet, who persists in trying to get it recognized in the face of derision, critical abuse and drubbings at the pub. Then, just like the one that got away, the "Book of Fish" is gone, vanished from the bartop where Hammet left it on a trip to the toilet. Meaningful to no one but him, the story bubbles and boils in Hammet's fevered brain until he sets out to re-create the "Book of Fish" from memory. This tale, filtered through the perspective of two madmen (three if you count Flanagan), is slightly divergent from the history of Gould you'd find on the Wikipedia (which never lies). Gould arrives in Van Diemen's Land in the 1800s, condemned not to a relatively quick death by hanging but to a relentless life in hell. The prison shipyards are ruled by the Commandant, driven mad by a prodigious intake of mercury, laudanum and opium and by an ambition "as enormous as his appetites, both dietary & carnal, & it was no less than the creation of a nation that would have as its heart the city-state he was already building the foundations for, with him for its Father." The Commandant's port settlement is populated by lunatics, grotesques and the scum of England forced into slave labor. In his leisure time, when he's not being beaten or half-drowned in his seaside cell below the high water mark, Gould writes about his life in bondage. "It had simply become a bad habit, as inescapable & as wretched as scratching my licy balls." Such accounts by convicts are forbidden by law and risk savage punishment. Using purloined bits of paper and blood picked from his own scabby flesh, Gould creates his defiant art. "If I had a bottle of good Indian ink, I'd be a hell of a lot happier, & in somewhat less pain. On the other hand, mine is far from a black & white story, so perhaps putting it down in a scarlet fashion is not so inappropriate. Please don't be appalled, compared to most of the vile crap that comes out of my body these days ... my blood is really quite pure & beautiful, & it reminds me that something is always pure & beautiful, if you will just look beneath the scabs & sores." Gould is allowed by his captors to paint. He shows a certain talent for artistic forgeries that can be exported and sold and for still lifes that British officials can present to their mistresses as gifts. And for fish: In his painting, Gould finds subtle, undetectable ways to reflect the horrors of his surroundings. His piscine portraits express "my own fear at this cracked world in which I & they & everything was trapped." Gould's work catches the eye of Tobias Achilles Lempriere, a corpulent, grub-like surgeon who appreciates the "scientifick" detail. The Surgeon recruits Gould in an effort to catalog Nature, starting with the fish, in preparation for that grand day when science supplants art and assumes its rightful supremacy in the mind of enlightened man. Gould guzzles the Surgeon's rum and nods a lot. "It sounded suspiciously like an attempt by the Surgeon ... to recreate the natural world as a penal colony, with me, the gaoled, now to play the part of turnkey. Still, I had had worse offers." But Gould finds his assignment taking on a personal meaning. It's more than a means to escape arbitrary floggings. He begins to take the job seriously, at least the artistic aspects of it. He's making an honest effort to capture the essence of fish. As Gould's talents develop, the Commandant's insanity progresses: "The more he advanced in his belief in his manifest destiny, the more he declined in the practice of sense. His talk became of impossibilities -- of building a temple of odours; of lifting the Penitentiary into the air by the power of levitation, so escape would be impossible except in balloons; of developing mesmerism as an offensive weapon for his army by raising a regiment of spiritualists who would stand in the front row of great battles willing the other side to lose." The Commandant borrows Gould from the Surgeon to record in a series of elaborate murals the glories of the Commandant's would-be empire. While sidelined from his fish study, the Surgeon loses his spirit for the project (along with some other beloved equipment), turning instead to the harvesting of Aboriginal heads for study. But Gould can't let the fish go. The painting of sea life is no longer a simple shelter against sadism. Gould's art has become an obsession, an essential -- and endlessly frustrating -- sustenance. "The more I looked at those sad creatures, still dying, the occasional mortal flap of the tail or desperate heave of the gills signaling their silent horror was not yet ended, the more I looked into the endless recesses of their eyes, the more something of them began to pass into me" while "some small part of me, without me willing it, was beginning a long, fateful journey into them!" His painting is his life, the only thing he has left, the only thing he cares about. And in this setting of merciless suffering, an awakening of passion through art is dangerous, perhaps even deadly. "I knew in order to survive & prosper it was important to feel nothing for anyone or anything, & I knew I wanted to survive & prosper. But because of my newfound proximity to what hitherto had been little more than stench wrapped in slime & scale, I began to dream that there was nothing in the extraordinary universe opening up in front of me, not a man or woman, not a plant or tree, not a bird or fish, to which I might be allowed to continue remaining indifferent." "Gould's" is a good book to experience with a buddy -- providing your buddy is of stern constitution and not easily repulsed. Flanagan is so clever and puckish in his wordplay that there are passages that could be read one way or could be read another and were probably intended to support multiple interpretations. "As with the skin of a bastard trumpeter caught at night, the book's cover was now a mass of pulsing purple spots." That sentence may bring to mind a "Jackass"-type prankster/musician thrashed black and blue by a mob of angry, interrupted slumberers. But there is also a trumpeter fish that glows purple in the dark. Shakespeare, an incorrigible punster, might have liked that one. And even if all of us in the audience are wrong, it's all part of the natural process of writing and reading. "A book at its beginning may be a new way of understanding life -- an original universe -- but it is soon enough no more than a mere footnote in the history of writing, overpraised by the sycophantic, despised by the contemporary, and read by neither. Their fate is hard, their destiny absurd. If readers ignore them they die, and if granted the thumbs-up of posterity they are destined forever to be misconstrued." Gould's plight as an artist goes beyond mere miscommunication issues. His account flies in the face of an unassailable official record that praises the European conquerors for their compassion, nobility and the unflagging, saintly patience required by the endeavor to enlighten Australia's savages and England's societal dregs. In the only history that counts, the written word -- a great power for liberation -- is malignantly warped to enslave. Flanagan philosophizes about the simultaneous futility and absolute necessity of artistic expression. Each of us lives in our own little bubble of perception, and no one, no matter how intimate, sees the outside world exactly the way we do. Or sees us the way we see ourselves. Art -- imperfect, open-to-interpretation-by-idiots art -- is perhaps the best bridge between bubbles that we have. As badly as I believe I've fumbled this review, I kept writing. I've failed to convey how exciting and special (and heinously gruesome) this book is, but I had to take a shot at it in the hopes of luring new readers for Flanagan to shake and shock and amaze and engage. Some of us feel a compulsion to communicate that's unsatisfied by a click of the Like button or an emoticon. Often such communication is a failure. But we keep casting our lines. "Maybe we have lost the ability, that sixth sense that allows us to see miracles and have visions and understand that we are something other, larger than what we have been told." -- Richard Flanagan by way of Sid Hammet (or maybe it's the other way around)

What could anyone have done to deserve the fate of William Buelow Gould? The worst that can be said of his character in "Gould's Book of Fish" is that he makes a habit of living on the wrong side of fate. From his random and illegitimate birth to an Irish maid and a Jewish laborer in the early 19th century, through his routine incarcerations for the most ridiculous non-offenses, he stands as a symbol the pain, brutality and aching beauty of his times. From the book's outset there's a sense of evanescent, transformative magic amid the menace of William Gould's life. He speaks to the reader first through the ministrations of a devoted, twentieth century seeker of beauty, who finds Gould's original autobiography, a collection of obsessive scribblings and startling icthyological illustrations, stuck in the prison of an antique chest in a junk shop. When the book is mysteriously lost, its bereft and obsessed owner sets out to recreate the work with the extra authenticity of a disciple's devotion. So this is a book about a book. And from the outset, Flanagan's writing makes it a triumph of revelation and humanity. This is no small task, considering that the bulk of William Buelow Gould's star crossed existence takes place on Sarah Island, Tasmania's own answer to the Devil's Island of Papillon fame. The startling, eloquent language Flanagan employs to outline the savagery of this most infernal place is one of the book's many strengths. It has all the elegance and eloquence of the language of its times while retaining a sense of intimacy and immediacy. William Buelow Gould's life a riot of debacles that go well beyond Rabelaisian levels of debasement. His tormentors include the colony's Commandant, who, under an assumed identity, sets out to create a Potemkin village of European enlightenment amidst the insanity of his own being and environs; the physican, who meets with a undignified gustatory end at the hands of his monstrous pet pig; and the guard, with whose corpse, through a series of bizarre and surreal events, he shares a cell that fills with water at the coming of the high tide. Taken under the wing of the physician, Gould's artistic talents are put to work in the service of a primitive form of eugenics. He's commissioned to create a book of fish to rival the one of birds by the celebrated Audubon, the better to raise the esteem of the physician among the men of science towering over the enlightment at home. Through his compliance, Gould finds a way to transform himself, and his world, in a way that defies all the evil that humans can foment. The only logical conclusion that the reader can draw in this supremely surreal novel is that there is no art, or life, without suffering. Few literary characters have suffered as much for art as William Buelow Gould. And fewer modern authors have created an historical novel with so much mystery, color, and wisdom.

Luckily I had read other recommendations. The book is difficult to read the language and the imagery. It's creative and intriguing for the dark corners of humanity. It's a bit like having euphoric dreams but then these horrible nightmares pop up. I liked the dreams but the nightmares were more than I wanted to know (about prison life in that period). An incredible character was Gould.

The "Gould" of this novel's title is William Buelow Gould, a real-life convict who served time at the remote penal colony of Sarah Island, Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) in the early part of the nineteenth century. Gould left behind scant biographical details, but he did produce a remarkable sketchbook containing illustrations of the local sea life. In "Gould's Book of Fish", fellow Tasmanian Richard Flanagan has imagined a lost memoir written in the margins of the sketchbook, divided into fish-headlined sections. The compelling strangeness of this place and time is robust enough to power any conventional historical novel. But this book does not abide by convention. Firstly, there is the sly structure and conceit: a lengthy prologue, by an admitted forger of the present day, establishes that the proceeding pages are a skilled recreation of Gould's "real" lost writings, drawn from the forger's memory. (It could be said that Flanagan's book, and other historical novels, are essentially works of fraud.) Secondly, there is the magnificent prose. It mixes a densely old-fashioned, elevated style with archaic regional slang, scatology, and occasional flights of gorgeous modernist fancy. For bibliophiles, it's a joy to read. Thirdly, the story is wild and engrossing. From Gould's background of petty thievery in the British isles to his exile in Tasmania, the book overflows with adventure, beauty, terror, and some of the most memorable characters in recent literature – like the megalomaniacal Commandant that goes around in a solid gold mask, the obese camp surgeon Lempriere, Gould himself and his reluctant infatuation with painting fish and with the Commandant's aboriginal concubine, "Twopenny Sal". Much like this year's "The Underground Railroad", "Gould's Book of Fish" tweaks the settings of reality while not shying away from the hideousness in our past. It has it all: hilarity, violence, eroticism, humanism; commentary on art, colonialism, recorded history, and (I'm sure) a hundred other things that flew over my head. (And if you're an audiobook listener, Humphrey Bower has recorded one of the most fantastic narrative tracks I've yet heard.)

The authors effort doubtlessly should be rewarded for its unusual and creative form and it's ability to repulse the reader, but I found the book unreadable. I can imagine this is college-level required reading which most students would hate but academics would laud, but for 2/3 of people who read for pleasure, enlightenment, or inspiration...this isn't for you. There are many quite funny quips on almost every page but they don't make up for the un-readability of the content. I abandoned the book after about 25% and it remains unread. Booker prize indeed!

This is a highly inventive novel that seems to lose its way halfway through as the author starts throwing in any creative image that comes his way whether it fits the character or not. A good example is "I have stolen songs from God," a phrase that (while beautiful) bears on nothing in the plot or character. This book is somewhat of cross between TRISTAN SHANDY and MARTIN DRESSLER and is strikingly original but meandering. The best scenes are those involving The Commandant and his ambition for creating a world as big as his ego. The results are hilarious, as is the final achievement of the Surgeon with his phrenology specimens: a last laugh at science and scientific humanism. There is obvious affinity here with Celine's JOURNEY TO THE END OF NIGHT--a novel similar in style, narration and world view. Flanagan does not suffer by comparison.

In the reviews that are printed in the Grove Press Trade edition, I counted 22 renowned authors the critics cite with whom to compare Flanagan. The list is rather impressive and includes Joyce, Melville, Conrad, Rabelais, Borges, Hemingway, Marquez, Swift, Morrison, Pynchon, Sterne, Dante, Ovid, de Quincey, Heller, Dickens, Camus, Faulkner, Fielding, Smollet, Dostoevsky and, by inference, Peter Carey (the reference is to Carey's character, Ned Kelly in The True History of the Kelly Gang). Throw in a reference to Wuthering Heights (in terms of the book's lingering effect upon the reader's imagination) and you see the sort of playing field Flannagan is occupying. In terms of critical acclaim, the guy has arrived. The praise is justified. Great novels introduce us to fully realized worlds, which burst forth from singular imaginations. This is just such a work. As T.S. Elliot noted, great literature also connotes, contains and reexpresses the great literature of the past. As you can infer from the number of references cited, this book acomplishes that. Great works also contain great characters and William Buelow Gould, "sloe-souled, green-eyed, gap-toothed, shaggy-haired & grizzle-gutted" is as large and expressive a character as has been penned in recent literature. He's witty, expansive, loveable, colorful and as dimensional as they come. He's unforgettable, as are several of the other characters in the novel, most notably the penitentiary surgeon, Mr. Lempriere, in his passionate quest to become another Linnaeus, fellow convict Capois Death, who represents the life-force irrepressible. Towering over them all is the most surreal Commandant, once himself a convict, who through luck and subterfuge has assumed the identity of a British officer who perished in a shipwreck off the coast of Tasmania. He is rescued and taken back to the nearby penal colony, where he again lucks out when the old Commandant dies and there is no one else to replace him. He ultimately assumes absolute power and control over every guard, soldier and inmate in the colony and proceeds to engage all these unfortunate inhabitants in fullfilling his grandiose schemes. To accentuate his god-like stature, he has a gold mask fashioned for him, behind which his old identity disappears. His history and his fate, becomes inextricably linked with Gould's. One word of warning, and it is the sort of warning that small children would be powerless to obey, but I know that I am writing to intelligent, mature readers here. Do not look at the final page of the book!! It will ruin the read for you, I assure you, and it is such a great read, you really don't want that to happen, do you? Remember the old adage about Curiosity and the fate of the cat!! Don't be led by your feline instincts!! Save the surprise for the right time! I know that I've just made that difficult for you, but it's just not worth it, I assure you! OK, now that that's settled, go get a copy of this treasure and prepare for a marvelous voyage. BEK

I have looked forward to reading this book for some time because the concept of writing stories based around 12 fish is so unique. However, although the writing itself was good, I never could get into the story partly because there wasn't a character I could like in the book. I finally gave up trying to like it and discarded the book.

This is my third Richard Flanagan novel. It’s another completely different 5 Stars. Transported into the world of prisoner 873645, William Buelow Gould who’s name is a song that will be sung, and his painting of the fish whom he told all about himself being a bad bastard who forged himself anew as a worse painter, but a painter nonetheless. And whose paintings of fish were not meant for science or Art, but for people, to make them think, give them company and hope and remind them of those they had loved and those who loved them yet , beyond the ocean…So much food for thought here and clever, clever on so many levels . Awsome.

An astonishing book lurches from the story of a chap who is engaged in counterfeiting old furniture for sale to American tourists who visit Hobart to the story of a convict who is counterfeiting Constable paintings at the order of a brutal prison orderly. The convict and his fellow prisoners are subject to brutal treatment at the hands of the authorities. The story becomes Kafkaesque in its scope as the Commandant sets out to build a city on a small island using slave labour and funds derived from plundering the resources of the island-the trees are felled, the guano mined, the whales slaughtered. I felt the author was using this small island off the coast of Tasmania as an analogy for the desecration of the planet as the forests and wildlife are ruthlessly sold off for gain. The writing is amazing in its scope, dazzling in its execution and the unbelievable becomes believable. The fate of the indigenous people whose heads are shipped to London for anthropological research is devastating. Human life is held cheap on this island and it is almost a relief when the protagonist is dead and transmuted into a sea-horse. Not an easy book to read, but I recommend it as an extremely worthwhile endeavor. And there are occasional flashes of black humour which provide much needed respite from the darkness. One is left shattered but enthralled. I have bought Flanagan's Narrow Road to the Deep North but will refrain from reading it until I have recovered my equilibrium.

But don't let the weirdness distract you, this is definitely worth reading. Surrealistic imagery, intriguing story. There's something fishy in here.

This is not an easy book to understand or to review. It does not fit into any known genre, there is no mystery in the normal sense; while there are murders, we know who committed them. Is it a love story? Not at all, but the book blurb thinks so. It is an historical novel, but more of a surrealistic history of a penal settlement, overlaid with humour and irony. The story is told by a felon, Billy Gould who portrays himself as nothing more than a lying rascal, yet he reveals himself in his own words to be educated and moral. If you have read James Joyce's Ulysses, then you might have something to compare this novel with, but few people have actually read Ulysses, (apart from the final section) so there is not much help there. But if you have, then there are definite similarities in the word play, the metaphors, the allusions, the irony. Gould's Book of Fish -- should you read it -- will probably be the most bizarre book you will read in the next 10 years. Is it worthwhile you ask. Yes, it is worth the effort, because it is an interesting, unusual, poetic, mysterious, amusing, ironic, colourful, novel. It is set in Tasmania, Australia, around the year 1820 onwards. More precisely, it is set mostly on the tiny penal settlement of Sarah Island. A place where I have visited, although there is precious little left on the island, some bricks that were part of the oven, a ruined building, but almost no evidence. You could walk all over the island and find almost nothing of historical interest. But according to Billy Gould, a forger, a painter of fish, a man connected with the Commandant, there was a scheme to build the remote, tiny island, into a cosmopolitan city to rival London, complete with a railway; none of which happened in the novel -- or real life. The characters are all unbalanced, devious, corrupt, brutal, madmen. In between the lines of the story we find historical references to facts about the treatment of the prisoners sent from England, and the massacre of Aboriginals, the indigenous inhabitants. The basis of the story is that Billy Gould, a felon, thief, forger, was sent from England as punishment for his crimes. Imprisoned, escaped, re-captured, imprisoned and then chosen -- since he had some experience at forgery -- to paint reproductions of all the species of fish in Tasmania. This would raise the status of the Surgeon, when he presented the paintings to the English scientific community, enabling him to join the elite set in London. Billy Gould sets out upon his task with trepidation, until it gradually becomes an obsession. He appreciates the value of the task as it raises him above the rank of the ordinary prisoners, allowing him to mix with the supervisors, and more importantly gets him off the chain gangs cutting down trees and hauling logs. Even the food was better. During his period of painting fish, Billy Gould mixes with various officials, and so we are given a view into this surreal, absurd world, of the penal colony. This is not your average novel, but a mind-expander. Something to enlarge your view of literature, life, injustice. And yes, more interesting and easier to read than James Joyce's Ulysses. "Then, perhaps overcome with nostalgia for happier times, he gave me a good kicking. Afterwards I assured him he had all the attributes necessary for a successful artistic career, though unfortunately my mouth was too swollen to list them for Pobjoy's benefit: mediocrity; a violent capacity with any potential rivals; the desire not only to succeed but to see your fellow artists fail; gross insincerity; & a capacity for betrayal. Fortune favours folly, I tried to say, but merely succeeded in dribbling some blood & teeth." First published, 2001 This novel won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Well written and interesting even though it was a bit hard to read in places - only 2 of my book club finished it. Some people have written reviews saying that they found some bits funny but the humour was lost on me.