Customer Reviews

Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in 12 Fish

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Writing one of the must unusual and imaginative books I've read in a long time, Flanagan presents a multi-leveled novel which is full of wry, sometimes hilarious, observations about people and history, at the same time that it is a scathing indictment of colonialism's cruelties and its prison system, in particular. Almost schizophrenic in its approach, the novel jerks the reader back and forth from delighted amusement to horrified revulsion in a series of episodes that clearly parallel the unstable inner life of main character William Buelow Gould, who lives in "a world that demanded reality imitate fiction."

Sentenced to life imprisonment on an island off the coast of Tasmania, Gould cleverly plays the survival game, ingratiating himself with the authorities through his willingness to paint whatever they want-species of fish for the surgeon, fake Constable landscapes for the turnkey Pobjoy, murals for the Commandant's great Mah-jong Hall, and backdrops for his railroad to nowhere. It is through the fish paintings that Gould paints for himself, however, that he tries to hang onto his sanity against overwhelming cruelty, continuing to believe that life has meaning, though "[it] is a mystery...and love the mystery within the mystery."

This is not an easy book. The action, such as it is, is all filtered through Gould's mind, and that is shaky, at best. In a few passages, Gould (and Hammett, the speaker who opens the novel) describe dream-like reactions to events, reflecting their mental states (not magic realism). When the last hundred pages become surreal, the reader is well-prepared to accept the strange events which unfold. Flanagan's novel is very clever, and his use of specific fish as parallels to the people and events within chapters (especially the serpent eel) is particularly amusing. His characteristically 19th century list of topics at the beginning of each chapter, his duplication of the writing style of the period, his satire, his literary jokes (purple sea urchin ink for "purple prose," jokes about George Keats's brother, a failed poet), and his broad vision of what makes life meaningful are signs of a mature novelist who doesn't hesitate to take chances--5 stars for originality! Mary Whipple

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

This is most certainly a bleak read and if it hadn't been so well-written, I might have given up on it fairly early on. Readers that have faith that it all must mean something will have that faith rewarded eventually, though. Honestly, it took me until I reached around page 300 of this 400 page novel to decide that I actually liked it. By the time I reached the end, I was so, so happy that I had pressed on. This isn't just the catalogue of miseries it seems to be for so many pages. There is, indeed, a point and once the themes of the novel become clear, the reader finds himself remembering details from the previous few hundred page in a new, sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic way. Loads of fun. I am definitely moving on to something with a bit more tenderness for my next read, but I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Lovely to look at, too.

For those who have read Flanagan's early work Gould's Book of Fish will come as a surpise, even a shock. This novel has it all with elements of the masters like Faulkner, Borges and Conrad. Some of the book's violence is reminiscent of McCarthy's Blood Meridian.
Most of all it is great story told by one who will become perhaps modern fiction's most unreliable narrator, the liar and thief Billy Gould. If you want to understand the nature and brutality of Van Diemen's Land in the dark days of nineteenth century this is the book. This island now called Tasmania was England's gulag, a brutal penal colony. This was where the riff raff and unlucky players of the Empire ended their days. The native population were not spared either or, indeed at all.Through Gould's wild meanderings we learn what it was like to live at the whim of the colonial masters. And not many were granted mercy.
Flanagan has always had insight into character and the workings of the human heart. In the Book of Fish he has excelled not only with insight but with his vision of society, then and now. The big questions are asked.
This is great novel and is essential reading for those interested in Australian and colonial history, power, human nature and for those who love fantastic writing. Flanagan outdoes Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang here and the way the author winds up his novel is simply dazzling.

...was my reaction at the end of many pages amongst the first 50-60 - and that was after more than one reread of various sentences and paragraphs. I retreated to Amazon's book reviews to see if there was just cause that I should stay the course. Armed with an overview, I tried it again.

I'm used to straight-forward non-fiction. This book has lots of things going for it, but clarity is not one of them, especially at the beginning. The earthy dialogue and Mark Twain-style truisms kept me going. Eventually, I got used to Flanagan's style and could skip most of the rereads - I came to appreciate the beauty of his sentences, didn't try to go fast, and got caught up in the story.

The one-liners - "When (dirty word that starts with sh) is discovered to be valuable, poor people will be born without arseholes" - and such, appear on at least every other page, and lengthier discourses on the human condition punctuate every surreal idiotic adventure. Each ridiculous character is caricaturized and Flanagan produces a truly absurd cast.

Most of the book is monologue from the main character, who "never pretended to be other than where I was on the ladder - at the bottom. Competition wasn't so fierce, my manner was not so threatening, & a few holes in the market opened up for me...opportunity for me to mollynog with some of the ladies - fine or less fine, I was never that fussed - and in the main it was fine. Did I say tedious? Well, yes, that too, but it had the virtue of rhythm & the pleasure of certainty."

Anyway, Gould (a name he steals) is orphaned in England at an early age. He still manages enough education to fake a knowledge of literature and philosophy - or at least enough to do his chosen profession of con-man, counterfeiter, rabble-rouser, artist, womanizer, adventurer, and sot. Gould flim-flams his way across England, America, and Australia, never far ahead of a jail cell. Double crossed by one of his buddies, he is arrested on a trumped up charge and sent to a notorious penitentiary on Sarah Island in Tasmania. To avoid hard labor, he manipulates his way into a job painting fish for the resident surgeon - when he is not seeking enlightenment with Twopenny Sal behind the pigsty.

Numerous escapes and adventures occur that scatter enough corpses to satisfy the most bloodthirsty reader. A story line begins to take shape involving a fabricated historical account of the prison. Gould comes to believe Sarah Island's only true legacy will be from words he is able to scribble between drawings in his book of fish. The fishes he originally painted out of utility begin to acquire a mystical significance. At the end of each escapade, Gould treats us to a moral lesson he somehow divines from one of his fish:

"The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more sorrow or wonder than there is now, nor perfection, nor any more evil nor any more good than there is now. I have lived a life of meaninglessness for this one moment of meaning & these thing which I now know, & the knowing of them will flee my mind & heart as abruptly as they have entered."

Unbelievably, minor and major characters reappear, and Flanagan weaves the diverse, schizophrenic parts of his story into a seamless conclusion, only to rip it back apart on the last page. I am now about half-way through my second reading of this fascinating book.

Flanagan uses a penal colony and fish paintings to create a book that looks vividly at the edge between the joy and helplessness.

William Buelow Gould does not understand all the history happening around him, is not much of a hero, is surrounded by people who are not who they say they are, and is manipulated by times as well as tides. He paints, and falls in love with his subject. He reads and tries to understand the difference between truth and fiction. His world is full of grotty mysteries and inadequate explanations and occasionally a genuine miracle.

I lack the critical vocabulary to explain why I liked it as much as I did. Think Borges mixed with Faulkner with illustrations by Blake. And a little bit of Pynchon thrown in for good measure.

"I just wanted to tell a story of love & it was about fish & it was about me & it was about everything."

If you want to read it and can find it, then pick up the hardcover. The illustrations are much better and the chapters are printed in different colors-- making the "12 Fish" aspect much clearer.

A madness at once divine & profane is all that Gould sees & experiences in his wretched life, & all that he wants is rum & a soft place to lay his head. Yet all about him are madmen & such, Pickwickian monsters of depravity--& all about him are poverty & debauchery of the most bestial sort, & all he wants is a fine name to call his own & some legitimacy. Instead he finds himself a convict in Van Dieman's Land (Tasmania) in a penal colony on "Sarah Island" in a cell set near the rocks that line the shore, a cell that twice a day fills up with water forcing him to bob like a cork until his head nearly hits the ceiling, & then twice a day is emptied out to allow him to write his tale in cuttlefish ink & blood dipped from beneath his scabs upon a parchment of pages that contain his previously painted fish. The time is the early nineteenth century.

It is the melancholy fortune of a modern Australian forger of antiques (to sell to gullible American tourists) & a kindred imbiber of spirits to discover in a decrepit "meat safe" this extraordinary book, Gould's Book of Fish, & to be mesmerized by it & its author only to discover that all the authorities in nineteenth century antiquities to whom he presents the book disparage it as a fraud & a fake & show him the door. And then, what is worse, as he is taking his physick of beer at a tavern it is lost or stolen, at any rate disappeared from him, so that it haunts his memory to a great distraction until at length he is forced to rewrite from memory the entire oeuvre.

Thus we have the premise & the frame for this rather extraordinary historical novel from Down Under. It is a wicked tale of the debasement of humanity, spun out in a humorous & satirical style reminiscent at once of the great novelists of the nineteenth century, of Hawthorne & Dickens & Melville with backward glances at Voltaire, set in a milieu that suggests adventures in distant lands with pirates & various other scallywags, infused with the peculiar spirit of nineteenth century science, which Richard Flanagan both deprecates & celebrates. Overlaid is a veneer of artistick struggle & accomplishment culminating in the portraits of fish.

Yes, fish. These fish (& a lobster & two sea horses) are reproduced in this beautiful volume in color prints at the beginning of chapters so that one can see how Flanagan's narrator (& himself) were taken with the artistry of the painter. The type in the pages of this book (which is interestingly enough published by Grove Press) is set in wine vermillion & sea creature green & in octopus black & some other colors--I believe. The beguiling colors fade & return on these old eyes like faint visions, depending on whether I am using artificial light to read by or have the advantage of the sun streaming in.

In short, this is an extraordinary read, like nothing else coming out of the publishing factories these days, original to a startle, fascinating & funny, a work of art that gives one once again a reason to read fiction.

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.

I had never heard of Richard Flanagan until I read a short review of this book in the New Yorker. It was the quote, "finally. . . the book resembles only itself, a serene, chilling vision of human life as comparable to the life of fish, 'swimming in vast coldness, alone'" which induced me to add it to my long list of to-buy books, and it might have stayed there indefinitely had I not taken it off the shelf at a bookstore and seen that it was printed in 6 different colors.

I started it that night and was done within days: I read a lot of books, but this is the best piece of fiction I've read in recent memory. (I would say that it's the best book, but Philip Gourevitch's account of the genocide in Rwanda, This is to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, probably has to take the blue ribbon.)

This is a book about history, in the deepest sense, about what it means to be an authoritative account of life in a particular place and time. As fiction and magical realism at that, it succeeds in painting a more accurate picture of Australian colonialism than the traditional historical records.

Yet, despite its place in the somewhat erudite canon of literary commentary on the meaning of history, the book is also a wicked good story. (And it's written in six different colors.) I can't recommend a book more highly.

One day a young man discovers a strange book, a Book of Fish, written by the convict, William Beulow Gould, as he waits in solitary confinement for the day of his hanging after being convicted of, among many other things, murder. The book is written in all different colours and styles, with pages running into one another, when the author finished writing on the last page, he picked up again on the first, continuing the story between the gaps of the previous words. The young man - Sid Hammet - after a series of minor adventures involving the true identity of Gould - accidentally loses the book. But his mind cannot escape the wonders he read inside, so he decides to recreate the book as he remembers it. Thus begins the true meat of the story, a rollicking, picaresque adventure set on Sarah Island, a destitute, disgusting, decadent mess of an island, only a square mile in area, but filled to the brim with the worst convicts of the early stages of Australia's life.

Flanagan writes with vivid flair, scenes seeming to jump off the page and into the mind with consummate ease. The memorable characters were very much brought to life, while the throwaway men and women used to advance the story were exactly that: forgettable and poorly created. If we consider, however, that Gould is an artist and forger, an adventurer of the high sort, given to Villainy wherever it takes him, but ever happy, a criminal Candide, always looking on the bright side of things, then we can forgive this slip as a stylistic device rather than a weakness of the author. Gould is a perfectly realised character, and nowhere does the narration slip, or the author's true voice show through. Gould has a few stylistic tics that help to further create him as a person, replacing 'and' with '&', running words together and chopping them apart.

Thanks to a mis-spent childhood in a monastery, Gould is knowledgeable and confident in the classic literary works of his time and the ancients, sprinkling references liberally throughout his writings. Also, it seems as though many of the people he comes across in his flashbacks were actually rather famous - or more accurately, became famous after associating with him. Keats and Thomas De Quincy come to mind, among others. Many of these references are noticeable, but quite a few were obscure, as though a sly wink to those readers paying attention.

As the story progresses, a narrative pattern forms. The story progresses in waves; first, there is the build-up, where a future plot point is alluded to, then the rising crescendo as the tension mounts and Gould foreshadows both the event in question and the aftermath, using epic, dramatic language to heighten anticipation. Lastly, there is the inevitable crashing of the wave as the event enters into actuality and does not live up to the hype created. Gould is never revealed as a liar, more as a man who cannot separate the idea of what should happen to what actually did happen. His twin talents of painting and forgery - though it should be noted that both really only extend to fish - spill over into his life. Bright, vibrant colours and used to create scenery, people, places, but in the end, they are revealed to be nothing more than a cheap knock-off. This technique works very well, which is perhaps surprising, and it should be noted that the very last page, the afterword, is absolutely essential to the novel and makes everything click - something which, before reading the afterword, didn't seem necessary, but afterwards, changed the entire meaning of what came before.

While perhaps this work isn't a 'work of genius', as the front cover of the book attests, it is certainly an imaginative, evocative work that, thanks to the strengths of the imagery and of the characters, especially the narrator, stays in your mind long after the last page has been turned and the final words are read.