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

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Once upon a time that was called 1828, before all the living things on the land and the fishes in the sea were destroyed, there was a man named William Buelow Gould, a convict in Van Dieman's Land who fell in love with a black woman and discovered too late that to love is not safe. Silly Billy Gould, invader of Australia, liar, murderer, forger, fantasist, condemned to live in the most brutal penal colony in the British Empire, and there ordered to paint a book of fish. Once upon a time, miraculous things happened...

404 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1997

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About the author

Richard Flanagan

30 books1,593 followers
Richard Flanagan (born 1961) is an author, historian and film director from Tasmania, Australia. He was president of the Tasmania University Union and a Rhodes Scholar. Each of his novels has attracted major praise. His first, Death of a River Guide (1994), was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, as were his next two, The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997) and Gould's Book of Fish (2001). His earlier, non-fiction titles include books about the Gordon River, student issues, and the story of conman John Friedrich.
Two of his novels are set on the West Coast of Tasmania; where he lived in the township of Rosebery as a child. Death of a River Guide relates to the Franklin River, Gould's Book of Fish to the Macquarie Harbour Penal Station, and The Sound of One Hand Clapping to the Hydro settlements in the Central Highlands of Tasmania.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 699 reviews
Profile Image for Vit Babenco.
1,723 reviews5,398 followers
April 25, 2022
Gould's Book of Fish is a modern postmodern parahistorical novel. I can’t define what it does exactly mean but it sounds great.
I had begun with the comforting conclusion that books are the tongue of divine wisdom, and had ended only with the thin hunch that all books are grand follies, destined forever to be misunderstood.

All the history of humankind is a history of blood, tears and sweat…
…I have come to believe that trajectory is everything in this life, and though at the time it felt anything other than promising, the trajectory of my life was that of a cannon ball fired into a sewer – hurtling through shit, but hurtling nevertheless.

The history of humankind seems to be a history of feces too… And Richard Flanagan recounts it with a twisted panache and in an exquisitely metaphoric and lacy language.
I was hauling a sled of lies called history through a wilderness. Time laughed.

Sometimes history laughs and sometimes history cries… At times we laugh and at times we cry…
Profile Image for Magdalena.
Author 45 books148 followers
September 6, 2007
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 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.
Profile Image for Brian.
Author 1 book1,211 followers
March 22, 2015
If, like Gould, we gaze into life’s ocean and paint what we sea, will the fish be like us, the fish be like me?

The answer is yes.

When, like Gould, we search for the hero to our history, the savior of our story and find that files were god’s joke on memory and that beauty is life’s revolt against life, is it ok, like Percy Shelly, to pause and reflect that we were injured, and that means memory?

The answer is yes.

When we realize that definitions belong to the definer, not the defined; when we come to the comforting conclusion that books are the tongue of divine wisdom, and that, by definer’s definition, means they are nothing more than follies destined forever to be misunderstood, may we at least come to the place, like Gould, where we recognize that the flashpoint of event to memory is anything but truth?

Now we are asking the right question.
Profile Image for Steve.
251 reviews1,024 followers
December 4, 2018
A book this big offers an entire sea of woe and wonder (as well as aquatic metaphors). It’s about life, love, and death as well as the importance of truth and how slippery (like a fish) it can be. It’s a fascinating history of Sarah Island, home of a notorious 19th century penal colony in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). And it features as much blood, sweat, tears, pus and poo as you could ever imagine.

The story begins in modern times where an “antique” dealer in Hobart, specializing in furniture he distresses himself to seem authentically old, stumbles onto an eye-catching book of fish illustrations and marginalia by a certain William Gould. The story that’s handwritten in differing inks (including blood) is Gould’s account of his life as a forger, an apprentice painter who learned from John Audubon, and a prisoner shipped to Sarah Island. The original book gets wet and soon disintegrates. The book we get instead in the 400 or so pages that followed is what the dealer could remember of the story, reproducing it from his notes. If you think this metafiction smacks of postmodernism, you’d be right. I’ll have more to say about that in a minute.

Gould had a rather luckless start in life, and would never have thought to sell himself as a model of virtue. Even so, it was a false accusation that landed him in prison. Once there, he encountered a whole host of grotesque characters. Several were actually useful in that their benefits from his art meant that he got out of the worst prison duties. The dishonest commandant made a lot of money from the phony Constables Gould created. And the pompous, fleshy prison surgeon had Gould illustrate Australian fish, the taxonomy of which he hoped would gain him entry into the Royal Society of Science. An Aborigines woman there to cater to the commandant’s lecherous demands had more kindly relations with Gould. Even with our narrator’s reprieves and moments of love, life was not easy. His words describing the abject horror of prison life were indelible, more so than some might prefer. One particularly vivid example was an instrument of torture called the cockchafer.

Literary scholars would have a field day discussing whether this book transcends its postmodern tendencies. As I mentioned, it does feature metafiction, but it’s not presented as artifice. Another nod to postmodernism – Gould’s unreliable narration – succeeds too. It did not feel clichéd. The book also featured an element of transmogrification, a trope I felt it came by honestly. In fact, I viewed any fish/human interchange (which was always pretty tacit) as part of the appeal. I liked how it reminded me of the friend who turned me on to this great book. He goes by the name Gregsamsa (who, despite the allusion to Kafka, I’ve never seen metamorphosize into anything bad). What really sets this book apart from its more run-of-the-mill pomo brethren, though, is how it showcases genuine human emotion. You can’t help but empathize.

The language in this is another strength. Gould, as a narrator, has a distinctive voice as a man’s man and a man of his time. The sentences may be long and immoderately spiced, but for the most part are a pleasure to read.

What interested me most, though, was the message itself. I shouldn’t go too far into this because readers should form their own opinions, but it seemed obvious that one of the major themes was the Truth with a capital T – its presence, its absence, and its indeterminacy. Of course, it’s almost impossible to view an issue like this through anything other than a lens of our time, but I’ll try not to be too obvious about it. Anyway, the first quote that’s relevant is by the initial narrator, the antique dealer, who said, “Swindling requires not delivering lies but confirming preconceptions.” I guess by analogy, the most convincing fake news requires playing to biases. A bit later, someone told Gould that “definitions belong to the definer, not the defined.” These are consistent with a Nietzschean world view that says there is no truth, only interpretations. Later still, Gould wondered whether the truth even mattered. It was easy to be cynical. He had seen prison records at one point that were complete fabrications meant to make officials look humane and effective. To his credit, though, Gould reasoned that the truth does matter to those who can be hurt by the lack of it.

Then there was the inherent difficulty in rendering truth:
I no longer even cared whether my paintings were accurate or right in the way that the Surgeon & his Linnaean books of scientifick description wished paintings of fish to be accurate or right. I just wanted to tell a story of love & it was about fish & it was about me & it was about everything. But because I could not paint everything, because I could only paint fish & my love & because I could not even do that very well, you may not think it much of a story.

This leads to a somewhat related theme – the insufficiency of words to tell a story as big and true and encompassing as a man like Gould, aching to find meaning, would like. That didn’t stop him from trying:
I smelt the breath of my fellows. I tasted the sour stench of their rotten lives. I was the stinking cockroach. I was the filthy lice that didn’t stop itching. I was Australia. I was dying before I was born. I was a rat eating its young. I was Mary Magdalene. I was Jesus. I was sinner. I was saint. I was flesh & flesh’s appetite & flesh’s union & death & love were all equally rank & all equally beautiful in my eyes. I cradled their broken bodies dying. I kissed their suppurating boils. I washed their skinny shanks filled with ulcers, rotting craters of pus; I was that pus & I was spirit & I was God & I was untranslatable & unknowable even to myself.

The themes loom large, but there’s a subtle artistry to this book as well. It’s creatively structured, beautifully written (pus & poo notwithstanding), and good at making you think. For me it was four stars bordering on five. I couldn’t quite give it that last one because I sometimes felt slightly adrift. The sentences were loaded with commas, the characters were legion, and timelines were occasionally disordered (though trackable once you identify Gould’s then-current oppressor). It’s a big one to reel in, but well worth the effort for those who enjoy literary game fish.
Profile Image for PattyMacDotComma.
1,739 reviews1,031 followers
April 26, 2022
5★
“I am William Buelow Gould, sloe-souled, green-eyed, gap-toothed, shaggy-haired & grizzle-gutted, & though my pictures will be even poorer than my looks, my paintings lacking the majesty of a Girtin, the command of a Turner, believe me when I tell you that I will try to show you everything, mad & cracked & bad as it was.”


This is a story, a history, a fable that just washed over me in such a way that I accepted all of it and none of it as true. I did not know until after I’d read it that it was based on a real 19th century convict, imprisoned on Tasmania’s Sarah Island. So, of course, I also did not know this convict really was a painter who painted fish and that “Gould’s ‘Sketchbook of Fishes’ was inscribed on the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register on 1 April 2011.” [Australian Dictionary of Biography, ANU]

I don’t know if it would have made any difference, because I’m already an admirer of Flanagan’s writing, so I just went along with the macabre magic that this is and trusted him to get me to the end.

I won’t bother with the outer plot, which is a guy who sells ‘antiques’ to tourists in Hobart, preferring Americans.

“With their protruding bellies, shorts, odd thin legs and odder big white shoes dotting the end of those oversize bodies, the Americans were endearing question marks of human beings.

I say endearing, but what I really mean to say is that they had money.”


But he stumbles across a strange old tome which appears to be an autobiography by an artist convict about his time in the penal colony on Tasmania’s Sarah Island. Is it genuine? He seeks out a professor. All of Flanagan’s characters are uniquely recognisable.

“Professor Roman de Silva’s twitching movements and tiny, pot-gutted frame, his dyed jet-black hair swept up over his pinhead in an improbable teddy boy haircut, suggested an unfortunate cross between an Elvis doll and a nervous leghorn rooster.
. . .
Then he turned around to face me, brushing back his dandruff-confettied quiff for the hundredth time.”


Eventually, we are led into the book itself, which I read digitally, in black and white, although I believe the original hardcover is in various colours, as the convict had to concoct his ink from whatever was at hand. There is a beautiful short video with many of the drawings here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRle_...

“Having paint but no ink I have to use whatever is at hand to write—today, for example, I have knocked a few scabs off my elbow & am dipping my quill carved from a shark’s rib into the blood that oozes slowly forth to write what you are now reading. Blood’s thicker than water, as they say, but then so too is porridge, & I don’t attach any more symbolic significance to what I am doing than I do to rolled oats. 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.”

Gould is an artist and in real life did paint the fish as directed. Here, we have him required to produce fake Constables and such to be sold back to England. In return, he has marginally better treatment and stashes some extra paper to make his own book – this one.

This is ghoulish, funny, tender, and gruesome. The Aboriginal people are hunted like vermin, the prisoners are treated cruelly, and at one time, Gould’s cell is such that when the tide comes in, the water rises so high that he floats to the top.

“Not that I will drown: I will, as others before me have, hang onto the bars above my head for several hours, holding myself up in the foot of air space that remains at the top of the cell at high tide. Sometimes I let go & allow myself to drift around my small kingdom, hoping I might die as I do so. Sometimes I count my blessings as I float: this twice-daily bath lately seems to have rid me of my lice, & the cell, while damp & prone to a briny, seaweedy odour, is not redolent of the dreadful stench of shit & rancid he-goat that normally prevails.

Two blessings: that’s a sufficient challenge for my powers of mental arithmetic.”


The Commandant is nuts, treating himself with mercury for his syphilis and wearing a golden mask, presumably to hide himself. We don’t know exactly why. He sees himself as a man of destiny. What better way than to build a National Sarah Island Railway Station? From where to where? No matter. It was “the implacable conviction of the Commandant that railway lines grew out to train stations as willow roots to a lake, & that therefore before long it would be the busiest train station in the antipodes;”

The two hundred yards of rail to a roundhouse never sprouted any roots, nor did any bridges spring up off the island. I was reminded of the Herzog film “Fitzcarraldo”, about a man determined to drag a steamboat over the hills in Peru, an incredible scene.

But I’ve completely avoided the actual story of Gould, his fellow convicts, his jailers/gaolers, his sometime comrades, and especially, the Aboriginal woman of whom all take advantage but who seems somehow to maintain her dignity.

Lest you think it is all blood and mud, chains and death, there is Flanagan poetry, of course. Gould arrives at the island.

“Then I looked away from the island & down at the sea. I saw something I had never seen before, a very remarkable thing that I wished I might have words to describe but for which I knew there were no words: the stars reflected in the water, shining as bright as in the sky, as though we were journeying through the very southern heavens to arrive at this place of wonder; as though there were a thousand candles burning just beneath the surface of the still dark water, one light for each soul of every dead convict buried on the small isle of the dead to our right.”

It is a wild ride and not for the faint-hearted. The audio is wonderful, but I had to keep going back to the text to spend time with the words and think about the people. What a story!
Profile Image for zed .
567 reviews147 followers
October 17, 2022
Firstly this is like nothing I have ever read.

Secondly I knew of the subject William Gould prior to this read.

Thirdly I have actually seen Gould’s art in various galleries, recently in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

Fourthly it is not in my opinion a historical fiction as some may think but a bizarre magical realism journey that is phantasmagorical.

Fifthly it has some serious meaning of life questions raised.

Sixthly it has a lot of outright humourism’s.

Seventhly it portrays man’s inhumanity to man.

Eighthly it can have one researching who are real figures from history and who are not.

Ninthly it makes me think that for a small island, Tasmania sure packs a punch in terms of literature produced at a high level.

Tenthly it makes me want to read Richard Flannigan’s entire oeuvre.

Eleventhly it makes me know I want to revisit Tasmania.

Twelfthly it is highly recommended to those that think we are all fish.
Profile Image for Tony.
1,011 reviews1,845 followers
April 30, 2015
Fish? Well, why not?

Maybe we have lost the ability, that sixth sense that allows us to see the miracles and have visions and understand that we are something other, larger than we have been told. Maybe evolution has been going on in reverse longer than I suspect, and we are already sad, dumb fish.

Hard to argue with that, although any resemblance I may share with the pot-bellied seahorse is purely coincidental.

This is a beautiful book, for all its scabrous people and doings. It is, as any good blurbist will tell you, wonderfully imagined. A modern-day con-man finds a book of watercolour-painted fish with accompanying text from a convict in early 19th century Australia. Is it real? Soon we are swimming in the story of that book, of cruel confinement, drugged visions of grandeur, race, sex, every emotion and every type of man, a fine kettle of fish. While there is allegory to satisfy the biggest Thomas Mann fan, there is also writing that provokes as it amuses. In one sentence he eviscerates an entire legal system:

In that courtroom there was a lot of dark wood trying to take itself seriously.

Seriously. If you've spent any time in the majesty of the law, you will appreciate that that single sentence defines it even as it destroys it. Yet, our protagonist, finding himself in the dock, is able to reflect:

Because you see I was born not an evil man, but simply the bastard issue of a fair day's passion, a folly, a three-thimble trick like my present name, & beneath whichever one you lift there is . . . nothing.

That's some writing chops there.

But he's not done:

My real crime was seeing the world for what it is & painting it as a fish.

The 'kettle' is not simply an island penal colony, but the European system that would send men there, a "Europe exploding into a thousand atonal notes." See Thomas Mann reference above.

At best a picture, a book are only open doors inviting you into an empty house, & once inside you just have to make the rest up as well as you can.

This book is subtitled A Novel in Twelve Fish and there are indeed twelve chapters, each with a wonderful painting of a fish, twelve different types of fish. There are a dozen or so colleagues on the floor where I work. It was fun and relatively easy to assign a matching fish to each one. Oh, Serpent Eel, you know who you are. The Weedy Seadragon, the Kelpy, the Stargazer, the Striped Cowfish, the Crested Weedfish, the Silver Dory, the Freshwater Crayfish, the Porcupine Fish, the Leatherjacket, the Sawtooth Shark, and, you know, like I said, the Pot-Bellied Seahorse. I like my fellow fish, Richard Flanagan writes. But he also says:

I simply had spent too much time in their company, staring at them, committing the near criminal folly of thinking there was something individually human about them, when the truth is that there is something irretrievable fishy about us all.

I have to read all Richard Flanagan's other books now.

Profile Image for Carlos.
170 reviews105 followers
April 21, 2021
The portrait of the artist as a dying fish

But the truth was that the fish sensed that I was dying too…

I confess it took me several pages to realize the whole spectrum of this novel. And this of course, is a critique on my limited scope and lack of knowledge of the style in which it is written, the picaresque of centuries past, where prosaic humor is wrapped in an aura of honesty that is only reached after digging deep, where metaphors abound, and nothing stops the narrative flow that can go from the ridiculous to the sublime in the course of a simple sentence. I write simple and realize how wrong the term seems: simplicity is just an illusion. Richard Flanagan is in total command of the style, the form and the subject matter. After those several pages I referred to, it all seemed to glide through, and then and only then, was I able to enjoy…no, no, once more the word is not the right one, because the purpose of reading is partly to enjoy and mostly to enlighten.

Gould’s Book of Fish is a profound meditation on the purpose of art and the place of the artist in the world, on the need to lie and believe passionately on that lie, on the role of creation and its reflective nature, and most importantly, on the power of the artist to conclusively and intensively become his art. In other words, the ability of creator and creation to merge in an emotional and monumental symbiosis.

I was floating, breathing water, falling, rising, my weight as nothing compared to what I had once known, I was flying through water, dropping & soaring through dancing forests of bull-kelp, touching sea lettuce, coral, all the people I had known, pot-bellied seahorses, kelpies, porcupine fish, stargazers, leatherjackets, serpent eels, sawtooth sharks, crested weedfishes, silver dories & the sea was an infinite love that encompassed not only those I had loved but those I had not.

It is also a deep mediation on love; love translated into the passion with which the artist faces his task (the fuel that ignites that sophisticated engine called inspiration), and perhaps above all, love for the others (human, fish or aborigine) and nature. A penitentiary island in Tasmania seems to be the center of the world for a certain Billy Gould, not out of a need for the epic in life (although the book could very well be considered an epic narration), but simply (as it often happens) for circumstantial reasons: he was a prisoner in Sarah Island around 1830.

In the very first chapter, not still imbedded in the picaresque style but written in a more contemporary language, to highlight not only the idea of a present tense in the narration (a circle that closes beautifully in the last chapter in the form of a conclusion where Flanagan’s brilliant prose is full of heartfelt bravado), but of the interpretation in art (a crucial concept throughout the novel), the book brought to mind more than once Jorge Luis Borges’ mysteriously philosophical El Libro de Arena:

Even my feverish pen cannot approach my rapture, an amazement so intense that it was as if the moment I opened the Book of Fish the rest of my world—the world!—had been cast into darkness and the only light that existed in the entire universe was that which shone out of those aged pages up into my astonished eyes.

I seemed to be reading a book that never really started and never quite finished. It was like looking into a charming kaleidoscope of changing views: a peculiar, sometimes frustrating, sometimes entrancing affair, but not at all the sort of open-and-shut thing a good book should be.

The story enchanted me, and I took to carrying the book with me everywhere, as if it were some powerful talisman, as if it contained some magic that might somehow convey or explain something fundamental to me. But what that fundamental thing was, or why it seemed to matter so much, I was at a loss then -and remain at a loss now- to explain.


And then, when in that same first chapter the narrator stares deeply into the eyes of a pot-bellied seahorse that his friend Mr. Hung kept in an aquarium at his house, Axólotl (Ambystoma mexicanum: the Mexican walking fish!), the fantastic tale by Julio Cortázar inevitably came to mind:

I was not then a weedy seadragon, and so I could not sense its terrible imprisonment, which was endless. I fancied I understood its horrific calmness; only a lifetime later would I truly comprehend the reason for such: that sense that all good and all evil are equally inescapable. Yet understanding all, the weedy sea dragon seemed troubled not at not being understood.

I put my face to the glass, stared closer, trying to fathom its descending mystery. Then I imagined the weedy seadragon’s beauty arose out of some evolutionary necessity; to attract mates possibly, or to merge with colourful reefs. Now I know beauty is life’s revolt against life, that the seadragon was that most perfect of things, a song of itself.

With that long snout the seadragon was touching the other side of the glass to which my face was pressed. Its astonishing eyes rotated independently of each other, yet both were at different angles focused on me. What was it trying to tell me? Nothing? Something? I felt accused, guilty. I began whispering at the glass, hissing almost angrily. Was it asking of me questions to which I had no answer? Or was the seadragon saying to me in some diaphanous communication beyond words: I shall be you.


At one point, as our narrator is thinking of rewriting the story found on the Book of Fish and asks a professor for his advice, this is what the arrogant instructor responds:

“If you were to publish it as a novel, the inevitable might happen: it could win literary prizes.”

And it did.

Gould’s Book of Fish is an astonishing literary work.
Profile Image for Warwick.
Author 1 book15.2k followers
December 6, 2023
‘That a book should never digress,’ the narrator of this novel tells us, ‘is something with which I have never held’ – which is just as well, given the rambling, peripatetic nature of his tall tale, which blends elements of historical fiction, magic realism and picaresque into something all its own.

It’s based (rather loosely) on the life of William Buelow Gould, a Liverpudlian who was transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1827 for theft, and who subsequently produced a ‘Sketchbook of Fishes’ which has become an important touchstone in convict art and Australian naturalism.

In Flanagan’s retelling, though, facts are abandoned almost entirely. Gould’s watercolours of fish are taken up as a kind of extended metaphor on – well, take your pick: colonialism, the penal system, man’s inhumanity to man, Tasmania…I confess to finding the central conceit a little diffuse, though certainly productive. The joys of the book (which are many) are all in Flanagan’s narrative voice, which mixes cod-nineteenth-century constructions with creative Australianisms, and in the sheer creativity and variety of incidents which are packed in to Gould’s story.

Much of these draw on, or even parody, previous models – especially the convict narrative, which is a classic in Tasmanian literature. But the island is also a useful microcosm of whatever wider concerns Flanagan is interested in at any given moment: a ‘bastard world turned upside-down’, a ‘topsy-turvy land’ where anything could conceivably happen at any moment.

I’ve tried to read Flanagan before, and I’ve sometimes found his prose style a bit unprepossessing – somehow jagged, or breathless. I had the same issue here, and it took me a good 150 pages before I could latch on to the rhythm. Then again, there are moments where he pulls out all the stops:

I have a weakness for blue gin, old women, white rum, young girls, porter, pisco, human company & the Commandant's laudanum. I have a great fear of pain. I am beyond shame. Do you think I never informed on a mate? I was both cobber and dobber. I liked them & wept for them when they took them off to be flogged on my false information. I survived. […] I gave away all I needed. I was a vile piece of cell-shit. I smelt the breath of my fellows. I tasted the sour stench of their rotten lives. I was the stinking cockroach. I was the filthy lice that didn't stop itching. I was Australia.


As the story goes on, diverging more and more widely from the historical record, it becomes clear that blowing up the concept of the ‘historical record’ is a central part of Flanagan’s whole project here. Or rather, the idea that history (and historical fiction) can sometimes give of things happening in a logical, necessary order, progressing naturally. ‘Stories are written as progressive, sentence must build upon sentence as brick upon brick, yet the beauty of this life in its endless mystery is circular,’ he says: ‘the Past is as much a Chaos as the Present’.

In a climactic scene, Flanagan’s protagonist literally throws historical records, in the forms of journals and account-books, on to a huge bonfire made from an incinerated Aboriginal. It feels like an image at the very heart of the novel. ‘Onto the fire & into its hungry heart we heaped them all, all those lies that obscured the mysteries & clues & echoes & questions & answers, in order to escape that prison finally & completely & forever.’ The point is that history and fiction are dangerously close together, and the illusion of teleology can make the unpalatable palatable.

Everything that’s wrong about this country begins in my story: they’ve all been making the place up […] because any story will be better than the sorry truth that it wasn’t the English who did this to us but ourselves, that convicts flogged convicts & pissed on blackfellas & spied on each other, that blackfellas sold black women for dogs & speared escaping convicts, that white sealers killed & raped black women, & black women killed the children that resulted.


It’s a heady, sometimes overwhelming book, which works both as a historical fantasy and as a kind of anti-historical novel. I didn’t find it an unadulterated success, but it’s full of invention and has an impressive undercurrent of anger running beneath the surface.
Profile Image for Michael.
1,094 reviews1,939 followers
July 30, 2012
This novel of life in a penal colony on Sarah Island off Tasmania in the 1820's could be characterized as a scatological tragicomedy, as historical fantasy, and as a satire of the human race along the lines of Swift or Voltaire. The character William Gould, sentenced to life imprisonment for forgery he didn't commit, recounts his pathway of survival and tenuous hold on sanity and reaches toward meaning in his life by writing his story. Each chapter is linked to a painting of a specific species of fish. Both the colonial masters and inmates of the prison are free to reinvent themselves. I loved this most about the book, the creation of a microcosm to portray the dynamic foundations of good and evil, civilization and barbarism, historical truth and distorted fantasy.

The Commandant harnesses his free labor force for absurd schemes to recreate a new center of Enlightenment Europe replete with a railroad going nowhere and a Mah-Jong emporium. Gould fits in by painting forged Constables, fanciful scenery for the railroad, and murals for the gaming palace. The camp doctor Lempriere, dreaming of becoming a new Linneaus, commissions Gould for illustrations of fish and later collects skulls of slaughtered Aborigines to support anthropological preconceptions of Europeans as the master human species. This book constantly poses a contrast between man's inhumanity to man and the artistic creations of humanity.

Gould's discovery that a writer has effectively erased history with a whitewashed account of the colony threatens his sanity. More and more he comes to see people in the guise of fish and fish as people. I loved this metaphor of art being both a form of madness and a refuge to counter the madness of the world.

His art and his journal are what sustains him” “…this business of smuggling hope might make them wonder, might be the axe that smashed the frozen sea within, might make the dead wake & swim free. And that wasn’t a painting worth twopence, but something more criminal than stealing.”

It seems he represents all of us by his stuggling ambivalence: “Why is it that I am possessed of two entirely opposite emotions? …why is it that I still can’t help believing that the world is good & that without love I am nothing?” Yet, “any story will be better than the sorry truth that it wasn’t the English who did this to us but ourselves So there you have it: two things & I can’t bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary—how am I to resolve them?...For I am not reconciled to this world.”

His words near the beginning distill the scope of this wondrous book: “Cast-iron collars, chains & spiked basils, the smell of men's dying souls & living bodies, along with the true humour of suffering, the wondrous truth of contempt, the glorious freedom of neglect, the inarticulable fear of many fish & my unrequited love for them: these things I have known & will never know again. I was hurt by this world into making my soul transparent for all to see as words & pictures, but I was allowed to do it unbeholden & undazzled by anything other than that same shivering naked soul.”

Profile Image for Lynne King.
500 reviews820 followers
June 22, 2015
This is a beautifully written book but it is not for me. I was fascinated with William Buelow Gould and I also love anything to do with fish. I fish, flyfishing, paint and love fish. So why didn't this book appeal to me? Well I really don't know.

And as for the ending, well it was sheer fantasy...

Shame, an excellent author but then I really think that the hard life of living in a brutal penal colony was all too much for me.

The odd thing is that the author was born in Tamania and that is one of my dream places to travel too.
Profile Image for Peter.
301 reviews99 followers
February 6, 2024
Fantastical story exploring convict life in early 19th century Tasmania, or, as it was then called, van Diemen’s Land. The book is loosely based on William Gould, who was a gifted illustrator and painter, and especially on his ‘Sketchbook of Fishes’. Gould was transported to Australia as a convict for a minor misdemeanour, like many “criminals”. The book gives a good impression of the especially brutal penal colonies in van Diemen’s Land. Unusually, this exceptionally well written book also contains reproductions of Gould’s original artwork from his Sketchbook of Fishes.
Profile Image for Sue.
1,408 reviews642 followers
June 4, 2015
This is such a truly different book...on life, on art, on fish, on the development of Van Diemen's Land and neighboring islands. It's fact and fiction and myth. Sometimes difficult to read but ultimately very worthwhile. Is it hallucination? imagination? mysticism? erotic fantasy? a gross combination of all? and summarized in the world of fish and man.

This Novel in Twelve Fish is so much more than its title could ever state or imply. Under the guise of learning of Billy Gould's task to create paintings of fish, we readers will learn the history of much of mankind in the Southern Hemisphere, both native/black and newcomer/white and the newcomers' tenuous links to their home countries. Says Billy:

Let me confess at this point, that never have I been
so ill-prepared for a task as that of painting the
Surgeon's fish....
A fish is a slippery & three dimensional monster that
exists in all manner of curves, whose colouring &
surfaces & translucent fins suggest the very reason &
riddle of life. When forging money, I had always salved
my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending
the lie of commerce.
But a fish is a truth....
(loc 1773)

Billy Gould is obviously one of the newcomers, the conscripted. This land is not his chosen home. The fish are not initially his chosen task. But he comes to see a different world in the fish.

I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the
world was reduced in the amount of love that you might
know for such a creature. Whether there was that much
less wonder & beauty left to go around as each fish
was hauled up in the net. And if we kept on taking &
plundering & killing, if the world kept on becoming
ever more impoverished of love & wonder & beauty in
consequence, what, in the end, would be left.
(loc 2552)

And one final quote from the book:

Stories as written are progressive, sentence must
build upon sentence as brick upon brick, yet the
beauty of this life in its endless mystery is circular.
Sun & moon, spheres endlessly circling. Black man, full
circle; white man, bisected circle; life, the third circle,
on & on, & round & round.
(loc 4351)

This is not an easy book. At times it can be uncomfortable, but it also can be beautiful and is full of insightful moments. This book of fish is ultimately a story of mankind on the earth, man against man, man against nature, man against himself. Quite a unique book.




Profile Image for Paul Bryant.
2,381 reviews12.1k followers
Read
November 24, 2012
An afterthought -

I ran into this rave review here the other day

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

and it made me think whew, an intelligent human being not only liked this pile of self-congratulatory rat's feces but loved it and wanted to marry it so this made me think...


MAYBE I WAS A LITTLE HASTY



Damn, I hate it when I'm not 100% right about everything all the time.
Now I have to get this thing and try it again. This is the stuff of councelling sessions!

**************


In David G's review of the Sea the Sea by John Banville he described Mr Banville's novel as

the first person narrative of a monomaniacal narcissist

and it struck me that a whole group of modern novels fall into that category. You have to be a real expert to avoid your monomaniacal narcissists merely being bumptious bellyaching bores. So here's a little list (please add as appropriate)

I FEARLESSLY NAME AND SHAME THE BORES

Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess - apparently a masterpiece, but I'll never find out
The Mad Man by Samuel Delany
Gould's Book of Fish - el blurbo says Throughout, Flanagan never loses the well-imagined voice of Gould's candor or the character's dense descriptive powers, talents that translate into a thrilling text that reads like a blend of Melville and Burgess - in your dreams, blurbmeister
I the Supreme by Roa Bastos
The Book of Evidence by John Banville - oh god, take away the memory of this whiny voice
The Sea The Sea by Iris Murdoch - donated to this list by David so I don't have to read it, thanks DG
Tropic of Cancer & everything else by the egregious Henry Miller
Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac (this is yes, a harsh judgement, after all I give this one a good star rating, but times change and Jack the Typer just didn't keep up with them)
Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre - see Banville above
The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White

BUT IN THE RIGHT HANDS, IT CAN WORK PRETTY WELL

The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White (something happened to that boy)
Lolita by Nabokov
1982 Janine by Alasdair Gray
Money and other stuff I've yet to read by Martin Amis
Such Times by Christopher Coe

Any more for any more?
Profile Image for Nancy Oakes.
2,017 reviews875 followers
February 12, 2008
The writing in this book is sheer genius; I don't care what anyone says...I absolutely loved this book. It might be off-putting for a lot of people...it is like a story within a story within a story and you could spend hours dissecting it. This is one of those books that you simply must read more than once, and if I'm correct, probably more than twice. My copy is absolutely loaded with post-its with remarks and questions & quotations...the sign of a good book for me, where there are more questions than answers and I know I'll be thinking about this for a long while. An unusual postmodern work which is blended with musings about love, sadness, emotion & anger. This one will be a joy to read again.

now I'll try to give a brief (hah!) synopsis:

The story, which has as one of its main themes the reinvention of self & of history, begins appropriately with Sid Hammett, who buys up cheap chairs & furniture, applies some bizarre treatments to them and sells them as antique Shaker pieces to Americans who want anything old that tells a story. Sid finds an old book shoved into an old meat safe which, when he takes it out, its cover becomes a "mass of pulsing purple spots." (13) The book falls open to a the picture of a pot-bellied seahorse, and he sees a veritable hodge-podge of writing in all different colors, going every which way on the page. Sadly, he leaves the book on a counter in a bar and it disappears...so now he begins to transcribe what was in the book so he wouldn't forget it. What comes out of it is what we're reading and it is a tale that will suck you in from the outset.

The main character, the "author" of Gould's Book of Fish is William Buelow Gould, who became a prisoner at Sarah Island in Tasmania in the 1820s. But as you read the book, it begins to become obvious that you don't really know exactly who is writing this work...who is Billy Gould? He is left in a London poorhouse under the care & tutelage of a priest who introduces him to the power of storytelling. After he gets older, he (now all of this is according to our narrator & let me just say here that as you read you're going to get hit head on with that old nemesis of unreliable narration) makes his way to America, where he meets none other than J. Audobon (who makes his appearance here as Jean Babeuf Audobon) and begins his career as a painter. But once again, fate (and the law) intervene, sending Gould back to England, and he is promptly arrested for forgery and sentenced to serve his time in a penal colony in Van Diemen's Land. While he is subject to all manner of torture as punishment, he is rescued by the surgeon, Lempriere, who firmly believes that Science will finally allow all of man's dominion to be known so that man's mastery of nature "his final empire" (129) will be known. Lempriere's real purpose is to have Gould paint fish so that Lempriere can assist one Cosmo Wheeler (a British scientist) in the taxonomy & classification of the known world, assuring a place for himself in the realm of science. So Gould is released from the torture of the chain gangs & begins to paint fish. Throughout the book are his stories about life in the penal colony at Sarah Island, the people with whom he is forced to share time and space, and his musings on history, books, writing & colonization, all punctuated and intertwined with his drawings of fish.

Some of the character portraits are absurd, but each has a purpose and you need to not rush through the book, but read it very carefully. You will not be disappointed.

I was absolutely astounded after having finished this book. I would recommend it to anyone who has patience & wants a superlative read, but not to people who want a cut and dried story & plot line with an ending that ties everything up.
Profile Image for Ian "Marvin" Graye.
938 reviews2,717 followers
January 30, 2023
CRITIQUE:

Consummate Taswegian Metafiction

It's an understatement to describe this novel as a consummate work of Taswegian metafiction.

When you finish the last page, you can't help but return to the first page, in order to further appreciate the finesse of both design and execution that Richard Flanagan has achieved. Only by doing this can you truly appreciate how finely woven the novel, its structure and its narrative are.

Books of Fish

On my count, there are at least five versions of the book of fish:

* the real life William Buelow Gould's original paintings (published as "Sketchbook of Fishes")("The Allport Book of Fish");

* the (fictitious) notes and records written by Jorgen Jorgensen that were kept in the Registry of the penal station on Sarah Island in Macquarie Harbour (on the west coast of Tasmania) and inform Gould's description of life in the penal colony (they were subsequently destroyed in an Eco-esque fire);

* William Buelow Gould's original paintings supplemented by Gould's marginal writings ("Gould's Book of Fish");

* the narrator's copy of the paintings and writings that was stolen from the bar in the Republic Hotel ("the Salamanca Book of Fish");

* the narrator's reconstructed version of "Gould's Book of Fish"; and

* the novel we are reading, which includes the narrator's 40 page preface, and omits 40 pages of the original book, which were missing.

The narrator (ostensibly Sid Hammet) finds his copy of the book in an antique meat locker in a junk shop in an old sandstone warehouse in Salamanca Place, Hobart. He later loses it while using the toilet in the Republic (formerly the Empire) Hotel in North Hobart. (2)

The experts who inspected the book before its loss thought it was variously an "old fake", a forgery, or "some elaborate, mad deception".

The narrator is nevertheless enchanted by the book:

"I had lost something fundamental and had acquired in its place a curious infection: the terrible contagion of an unrequited love."

Unreliable Narrators

When the book's lost, the narrator undertakes to reconstruct it from memory (which, we're instructed, is unreliable):

"...From memories, good and bad, reliable and unreliable, by using bad transcriptions that I had made, some of complete sections, others only brief notes describing lengthy tracts of the book...

"How faithful the story you are about to read is to the original is a bone of contention with the few people I had allowed to read the original 'Book of Fish'.

"Certainly, the book you will read is the same as the book I remember reading, and I have tried to be true both to the wonder of that reading and to the extraordinary world that was Gould's."


In a sense, what the narrator has written is true to the book that he remembers reading, if not necessarily true to the book that the author, Gould, had written. Thus, Flanagan highlights that the experience of the reader is different from that of the writer/author.

On the other hand, the narrator's Vietnamese accomplice, Mr Hung, ventures that "books and their authors are indivisible," quoting Flaubert's statement, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi!"

description
Weedy Sea-Dragon Source:

Consummate Taswegian Metafishin'

The world that is described is a world in which there is both horror and love.

Life in the penal colony is like that described in "For the Term of His Natural Life".

Yet, there are also instances of love (some of it Rabelaisian), and regard for life, especially the life of fish. The narrator wonders what it would be like to be a fish (a weedy sea-dragon would be nice), to know the beauty and wonder of their world.

The narrator has two conflicting feelings, which are wrenching him apart:

"These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary - how am I to resolve them? Can a man become a fish?"

"...I tried to rewrite this world as a book of fish & set it to rights in the only manner I knew how."


Unfortunately, one feeling can negate and undo the other:

"...To love is not safe."

"...A dream is a dangerous thing if you believe in it too much."


"A Song [of Man and Fish] Which Will Be Sung"

Flanagan paints a picture of history/ the past, as an allegory, a fairy tale, (or "a song which will be sung"):

"Once upon a time there was a man called Sid Hammet who saw reflected in the glow of a strange book of fish his story, which began as a fairy-tale and ended as a nursery rhyme, riding a cock-horse to Banbury Cross." (2)

The novel ends with "silly Billy Gould riding a seahorse to Banbury Cross."

In the nursery rhyme, we see the coalescence of both man and fish:

"I was falling, tumbling, passing through glass and through water into that seadragon's eye while that seadragon was passing into me, and then I was looking out at that bedraggled man staring in at me, that man who would, I now had the vanity of hoping, finally tell my story."

If only there were fish enough to tell our stories.


FOOTNOTES:

(1) My wife, FM Sushi, being a native Tasmanian, went to University of Tasmania at the same time as Richard Flanagan. Both she and I are familiar with the many pubs, cafes, restaurants and retail outlets in Hobart (including those in Salamanca Place and North Hobart) mentioned in the novel, as well as others in Battery Point and Sandy Bay. You could structure a walking tour around Hobart based on the novel's locations.

(2) Modern versions of the nursery rhyme include:

"Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
And she shall have music wherever she goes."


This is an alternative version:

"Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To buy little Johnny a galloping horse;
It trots behind and it ambles before,
And Johnny shall ride till he can ride no more."



SOUNDTRACK:



HAIKU:

Reading Sea-Dragons

Can you imagine
That a weedy sea-dragon
Could tell us your tale?


TYRE'S BOOK OF SUNSETS
("A Dream is a Dangerous Thing")
[AN HOMAGE]


My mother taught me to appreciate the beauty and wonder of the world.

Rather than start music or painting or sculpture, I took up photography. My favourite subject was sunsets, especially when I watched the sun go down over the park in my neighbourhood. Although they were all made of the same parts, they all looked unique, somehow different from each other, like people.

One night, on the way back from the park, I was intercepted by the police. They dragged me out of my car and beat me to death, and I died three days later. Did it make any difference that the officers were all black? I don't think so. It probably would have been worse, if they'd been white.

Either way, it was the system that took my life. The individual officers, whatever their colour, are just the instruments that allow the system to achieve its goal. It makes no difference that they were all suspended, and might one day be found guilty of second degree murder. That was just the administrators of the system trying to distance themselves from their crimes, trying to prove that they were somehow, only once I'd been murdered, interested in justice for me and my mother and step-father.

The problem is that I will never see or photograph another sunset in the park. I will never again experience the beauty and wonder of the world. Nor will I ever get home safely. Nor will I ever show my mother another photograph I've taken. Nor will I ever feel her love again in this life (although I know that she still loves me, and will do so until the day she dies).
Profile Image for J.
239 reviews122 followers
May 3, 2021
This divagating novel is about more than fish. For whatever twists and turns in the plot—which include the protagonist traveling from England to America and back, then to Australia and to Tazmania—and whatever strange cast of characters—which includes a visionary but maniacal golden masked commanding officer and a surgeon who mangles his reproductive organs during a window mishap—it is a philosophical and far-reaching book. It is about history, and about how all the history books in the world added together don't equal the truth. The truth is vaporous. All is subjective, even if all encompassing.

It's about one’s station in life. How that station is dictated by and challenged by one’s birth as well as one's actions. Whatever that entails for each of us, there is endless awe and endless brutality in the world.

"... all life, properly understood, is a savage dream in which one is shuffled about, taken by the tides and winds and the knowledge--constantly in danger of being lost--that one is only ever an awestruck witness to everyday wonder."

The protagonist, a prisoner named Gould, lives in a world crueler than most. But Gould does not envy those who rule him. Fame and glory add nothing in the end. The quest for power and money is silly in the face of love, but even love is no salvation.

The prisoners of Sarah Island are a mighty "chain-gang." A huge number of men are made to perform heavy labor while suffering unspeakable tortures and daily humiliations. All this for the glory of Mother-England. Tazmania was merely a bonus in the conquest of Australia in the heydays of that country's imperialism, Sarah Island only a penal colony far away and out of mind. Another source of riches and pride. All this is not even the worst as genocide occurs in the background to the antipodean aboriginals.

"The wealth of a few seemed so curiously dependent on the misery of the many."

The Book of Fish is about how human life is only important while it's being lived. As soon as breath ceases, all dies: who one was, and what one did. It dies with the dead. How it happened, how one lived, is only known by those who were there, only known absolutely by the one who lived it. And then, memories are also dubious. Even if the history of a person, of an epoch, is written, it is second hand. But if it were 100% true, which is impossible, what would it matter? What would it mean to the one who had lived it, one's whole life written on so many pages? What would it mean to anyone else? All is subjective. All is full of wonder and mystery.

If you think the novel sounds pessimistic, you're right. Even when Flanagan’s musings start brighter, like when in the beginning he describes the need for literature, and more broadly art, he ends equivocally at best:

"... reading and writing books is one of the last defenses human dignity has left... that we are more than ourselves... we are other than hungry dust. Or perhaps not."

And part of the book is seeing the world in the eyes, and even through the eyes, of a fish:

"...it was my own fear at this cracked world in which I and they and everything was trapped. It was a funny thing but then it didn't seem so funny that all these things were bound together for a moment and all existed as a single dying Kelpy."

Flanagan manages to show us some of the beauty in the world, but both beauty and horror are inescapable. Through the squalid life of the prisoners we see the worst humanity has to offer, the suffering civilization has given us. The devices of torture, the gruesome executions, all kinds of hell on earth. How glibly those fortunate enough to live outside such hell seem to ignore and shrug off certain facts of human history and life.

"He came to accept the world of endless labor, ceaseless brutality and pointless violence from both his masters and his fellows as the way all life was here, there & everywhere."

The style is a bit like that of Cormac McArthy's Blood Meridian. It takes some from Robert Louis Stevenson and a lot from Laurence Sterne and Herman Melville. Flanagan's vocabulary and knowledge of history are impressive. It is a dark world of words he uses to conjure an even darker world of deeds. He is not as recondite as Joyce or Pynchon, but he leans in both their directions while remaining more readable. The book is not lacking in humor either:

"If shit ever becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes."

History is a story—as many have said—that is "written by the winners." As soon as the present is known as the past it ceases to exist except as history. But The Book of Fish makes history appear frightening, because it is not the retelling of the past. It is the fictional story of the past, what’s left. This makes the real past meaningless. Our mistake is to take history as truth. Then, in the end, it is the truth that doesn't matter. And this is why the horrors of history repeat themselves, and the only lesson we learn from history is that we never seem to learn much from it.
Profile Image for Maciek.
573 reviews3,776 followers
April 19, 2013
My copy of Gould's Book of Fish contains three pages of snippets from various magazines and newspapers, all praising the novel as wonderful and inventive - since the pages are printed on both sides it makes for a total of six pages of admiration for the book. I felt almost as if I was reading a popular paperback bestseller picked up at the local grocery store, and not the winner of the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Not that there's anything wrong with either!

However, despite all the praise and promise, Richard Flanagan's strange story of William Buelow Gould and his Book of Fish did not appeal to me as much as it did to admiring reviewers and adoring readers, who hailed it as - among other compliments - a "seamless masterpiece". A peculiar phrase which eerily struck me, as of all things I thought that the book came apart at the seams as it went on, leaving a mess in the end.

The novel begins with the discovery of the eponymous Book of Fish by one Sid Hammet, an ex-con hobbling around Hobart Town without a greater sense of purpose. Hammet is a forger, who makes a living by buying off old and rotten furniture and selling it to unsuspecting tourists as antique relics of Tasmania's colorful past. During one of his sojourns in search of new finds, Hammet discovers the Book of Fish - a wondrous, improbable and incongruous story of and written by an ancient prisoner named William Buelow Gould. Despite his best efforts Hammet is unable to get the book authenticated - historians and art specialists deem it a clever forgery, an old fake - a product of a completely deranged mind, having perilously little to do with the reality of life in colonial Tasmania which it describes. Crushed by reality, Hammet nevertheless remains under the spell of the Book of Fish and its amazing illustrations, but loses it in a forgetful moment - leaving it on a countertop, to be never seen again. This event marks the end of the first introductory section of the novel - the second section is Hammet's attempt to restore Gould's work and write it down again, for posterity.

Richard Flanagan's own tactic of having Hammet speak about the Book of Fish in superlatives alone, setting it up as an incredible and life-changing work does not do his novel a favor - conceptually it is a complex work, with a multilayered narration and attempts to probe the deep existential questions of history and identiy - but it is neither incredible nor lifechanging. At the same time, Flanagan takes precautions against it by making Hammet rewrite Gould's words from memory alone - therefore barring himself from possible criticism against inaccuracies and inconsistencies, lack of coherence, etc. But it never really worked for me: I was not sold on William Gould and his Book of Fish.

Flanagan is obviously a good writer - when he wants to be. The first 40 pages - the Hammet section which encompasses his life in Tasmania and discovery of the book of fish - are among the best writing he has to offer in his book. Consider this short descriptive paragraph illustrating a melancholic early morning in Hobart Town during the winter.

Snow mantled the mountains above the town. Mist billowed down the broad river, covering like a snow-falling quilt in which lay the quiet, mostly empty streets of Hobart. Through the chill beauty of the morning, a few figures clad in the motley of cold-day clothes scurried, then vanished. The mountain turned from white to grey then disappeared to brood behind black cloud. The town was passing into gentle sleep. Like lost dreams snow began waltzing through its hushed world.

The beauty of this paragraph gets lost in the Book of Fish, which quickly descends into a nightmarish and claustrophobic vision of a single man locked up in Tasmanian prison. Colonial Australia offers a most fascinating place and period to set one's work in, and so many subjects to tackle - colonialism and crimes against the indigenous population, setting up of a new society, etc. Even the fact that it was the most brutal of the English penal colonies seems underplayed. I felt that all the potential was totally underused in the Book of Fish, where Tasmania is made no larger than one's backyard - while it is very much intentional as the novel is narrated by a convict who writes from prison, I couldn't help but wish for a more expansive vision. Flanagan's philosophical and existential musings often rang hollow and fell short of reaching their illuminating goal.

I was spoiled by reading Matthew Kneale's fabulous historical novel English Passengers - which I praised highly in my review - and which became one of my favorite novels. Kneale wrote a novel set in the tradition of old sea tales, brilliantly juggling a multitude of different voices (there are at least 19 different narrators) to tell his story, which is funny, poignant, impactful and memorable. I did not feel this way about the Book of Fish, though I wished I would. Even the fact that William Buelow Gould was a real English painter who was sent as a convict to Tasmania, where he produced his Sketchbook of fishes - now an Australian World Heritage material - did not help: I felt that he deserved a proper voice, without post-modern shenanigans that the author wanted to engage in. Gould's story is interesting enough to write a whole novel upon - which is what a fellow Aussie, Peter Carey, did for the famous Australian bushranger Ned Kelly in his 2000 novel True History of the Kelly Gang, for which he won the Booker Prize (and which I revieved here). Carey rightfully won the Booker for his novel, in which he presents the story of Ned Kelly from his point of view, paying extra attention to recreate the language that he might have used considering his education and upbringing and to create an Australia which would be full of the sense of place where Ned Kelly lived - hot, dusty, dangerous, wild and untamed land, populated by various colonist with various animosities against one another. That's a world worth reading about, where the whole continent is a prison.

In the end, the Book of Fish falls prey to its own cleverness, and loses itself in the magical reality of a Tasmanian Prison and endless weird occurrences serving as the background for musings on the issue of authorship and authenticity. Richard Flanagan proved himself to be a good writer and might even write - or perhaps already has - a great book; but I don't think that this is it. Despite being complex and ambitious it ultimately steers off into territories bordering on platitudes and leaving few traces in memory, dissolving like a parchment thrown onto water.
Profile Image for Rebecca.
4,084 reviews3,371 followers
unfinished
August 5, 2019
Sigh. This one utterly defeated me. I read the first 164 pages out of 404 last year (February through April) before stalling; I thought I’d finally try to get back into it for my animal-themed 20 Books of Summer, but alas, I could make no more headway. It’s a very amusing historical pastiche in the voice of a notorious forger and counterfeiter who’s sentenced to 14 years in Van Diemen’s Land. But what can I say? I could bear 164 pages of the wordy brilliance, but no more.

Favorite passages:

“Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations—that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls. And more, moreover. Or perhaps not.”

“A man’s story is of little consequence in this life, a pointless carapace which he carries, in which he grows, in which he dies.”

“That a book should never digress is something with which I have never held.”
Profile Image for Lisa (NY).
2,029 reviews797 followers
will-finish-in-future
September 17, 2019
Time to move on. I can't stay focused on this novel now.
Profile Image for Kara Babcock.
2,079 reviews1,554 followers
August 28, 2015
Britain had some whack ideas. Remember that time they colonized an entire continent with convicts? That was whack.

Gould’s Book of Fish is the epistolary adventure of William Gould, a convict imprisoned on Sarah Island. Somewhere along the way he picked up enough painting skills to become an artist, and he starts painting fish for the island’s science-and-status–obsessed Surgeon instead of working on the chain gang.

I enjoy books ( The Luminaries comes to mind) set in this frontier period of the colonization of Australia and New Zealand. Like The Luminaries, this book has a somewhat pretentious structure and style as Flanagan attempts to use Billy Gould to plumb the depths of human suffering and soul-searching. Each chapter is headlined by a particular fish from this book that Gould is working on, and the fish becomes a metaphor for the philosophical ramblings of that instalment in Gould’s life.

Basically this book is an account of Gould’s suffering on Sarah Island, and of the various strange and nonsensical happenings that he witnesses there. Since we’re being told this all from Gould’s perspective, there are some serious unreliable narrator issues here. So it’s not possible to take the events of the story at face value, to say, “this happened,” and use that certainty as the metric by which we can judge Gould’s rambling.

Case in point: the characters of this book aren’t so much people as they are examples of types of excess that afflict the human experience. (This is confirmed, in the most postmodern of ways, by the “afterword” note.) Each character is a facet of Gould’s madness—a madness that might have been exacerbated by his imprisonment but maybe has lurked there all along, lurks beneath all of us.

Two things that I loved about this book.

Firstly, Gould’s narrative voice is rich. It’s one thing to write a book set in a historical period and another thing to write with the voice of someone from that period. Through diction, sentence structure, and punctuation, Flanagan makes Gould’s voice come alive. This makes the book entertaining despite the darkness inherent in Gould’s experiences.

Secondly, just when you think you’ve seen all Flanagan has to offer, he manages to change things up and deliver an even crazier situation. He certainly has imagination, and it shows on every page here. This is a very creative book, and that made it more enjoyable.

So what stops me from singing more than dull praises? Is it the weird ending? The bizarre use of a frame story that Flanagan never returns to (except with one passing reference)? Or the constant parade of deaths, either real or metaphorical, without much in the way of happiness? Gould’s is a very Hobbesian view, mixed in with a certain amount of postmodern irony. Humans are just other animals, full of natural and atavistic urges. We pretend we suppress those urges, but that’s a lie. And that’s apparently the source of our unhappiness.

This is a book that tries to be deep, and I suppose if you are willing to spend the time to study and analyze and prod it, you’ll find those depths. Maybe I’m just growing impatient in my old age. Maybe I’m losing my enjoyment of subtext. Whatever the reason, Gould’s Book of Fish was an adequate way to spend my time. But neither Gould’s voice nor Flanagan’s capacity for storytelling surprises could quite compensate for the almost desultory atmosphere that pervades the text. Maybe this will be the intensely philosophical, brooding text that you have been waiting for—I can’t discount that possibility. It just didn’t speak to me. I know this because I’m not particularly proud of the quality of this review. I could have spent more time talking more deeply about the philosophical underpinnings of this book. I just don’t care enough about it to do so. I’m going to go buy tea now instead.

Creative Commons BY-NC License
Profile Image for switterbug (Betsey).
922 reviews1,416 followers
July 16, 2013
This rollicking, raunchy, scatological, outrageous, hallucinatory, labyrinth, surreal faux history by Tasmanian Richard Flangan is told in the confessional voice of William Buelow Gould, a convict in 1827 on the British penal colony of Sarah's Island, off the coast of Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania).

"Once upon a time...long ago in a far-off place that everyone knows is not here or now or us." This pertains to the barbaric fable of this mind-bending, postmodern narrative.

The real convict Gould wrote a sketchbook of fishes--now recognized as a document of world significance by UNESCO--which are reproduced here and folded into the novel, replete with different color inks and a fish sketch for each chapter. The inks are made of whatever Gould can obtain (use your imagination, as he does) on the island, since paints are declined to him.

Gould is imprisoned below the sea line, in a special cell consisting of a floating dead man and a water line that threatens to rise with the tides. It is here that his confession is told, one that, between the layers of verbosity, a compassionate story of humanity is told.

Recognized as an artist of some worth upon arriving on the island, Gould was ordered to paint fish for the insane Dr. Lempiere, the island's British surgeon, a whale pig of a man who speaks loudly, in BLOCK LETTERS. Lempiere was obsessed with taxonomy. He hoped that breaking the world down into all its classifiable elements would help him get into the Royal Academy of Science. This classification also symbolizes the British colonialist approach to the prisoners, and the aboriginal people in general, who are classified as the lowest form of life.

"I was to paint fish, you see, all manner of sea life: sharks, crabs, octopuses, squid & penguins. But when I finished this work of my life, I stood back & to my horror saw all those images merge together into the outline of my face."

The pseudo-science of phrenology was also on the rise then, the belief that character traits could be analyzed by the configurations of the skull. Says Lempiere:

"...NEW SCIENCE--NEW SOCIETY--NEW AGE--PHRENOLOGY, PARTICULARLY IN REGARD TO VANQUISHED AND INFERIOR RACES..."

Flanagan's imaginary autobiography gives voice to the heinous treatment and torture of prisoners on Sarah Island. The writing here is reminiscent of Pynchon, approaching sociopolitical subjects such as imperialism and racism through linguistic hijinx. Flanagan can seamlessly juxtapose a tender scene of love with a harrowing scene of abuse. Within the digressions and verbosity that is the hallmark style bestowed to Gould's narration lie the most potent, unspeakable truths of life and death in the penal colony.

"Death was in that heightened smell of raddled bodies & chancre-encrusted souls. Death arose in a miasma from gangrenous limbs and bloody rags of consumptive lungs. Death hid in the rancorous odor of beatings...with the insidious damp that invaded everything, was seeping out of sphincters rotting from repeated rapes. Death was in the overripe smell of mud fermenting...so many fetid exhalations of unheard screams, murders, mixed with the brine of a certain wordless horror..."

Gould, with his many colored inks, speaks to the reader of these wordless horrors. It will leave you mute and screaming; it will enfold you with its deafening cries. "...So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to."
Profile Image for MimbleWimble___ Elli Maria  Moutsopoulou.
326 reviews50 followers
August 21, 2022
Εγχειρίδιο Ιχθύων, Richard Flanagan, @psichogiosbooks

Το βιβλίο που με παίδεψε απολαυστικά 🦭

Ο Χάμετ, ένας παραχαράκτης από την Τασμανία, βρίσκει τυχαία το χειρόγραφο ενός βαρυποινίτη, του ξακουστού Ουίλιαμ Μπιούλοου Γκουλντ, ενός παραχαράκτη του 19ου αι., που μετά έγινε ζωγράφος αλλά και λίγο δολοφόνος και τελικά μετατράπηκε σε ψάρι, αφού πρώτα διηγήθηκε την ιστορία της Τασμανίας, της φύσης και των ψαριών της, των βαρυποινιτών της αλλά και των Αβοριγινών της. Ο κρατούμενος βρίσκεται στο νησί Σάρα, το οποίο αποτελεί φυλακή και τάφο μαζί, το "σωφρονιστικό ίδρυμα" της Αγγλίας.

Το βιβλίο αποτελεί δριμύ κατηγορώ απέναντι στη δύση για όλα τα αδικήματα που έλαβαν χώρα στην Τασμανία. Εξιστορούνται σε αυτό τόσο τα βασανιστήρια που υπέστησαν οι φυλακισμένοι, οι οποίοι ως επί το πλείστον χρησιμοποιήθηκαν σαν εργατικές μηχανές, όσο και η γενοκτονία των Αβοριγινών αλλά και η φυσική καταστροφή από ανθρώπινα χέρια.

Ο τρόπος με τον οποίο γίνεται η εξιστόρηση είναι μαγικός, χιούμορ και πόνος μπλέκονται τόσο άρτια που το μυαλό σου νομίζεις θα εκραγεί.

Ο Φλάναγκαν συνδιαλέγεται με τους/τις αναγνώστες/ριές του μέσω των ηρώων του , δίνει φωνή σε εκείνους που η ιστορία προσπάθησε να θάψει, στους αριθμούς των κατάστιχων και μας υποχρεώνει να γίνουμε μάρτυρες στα ιστορικά γεγονότα που αποσιωπήθηκαν στοχευμένα.

<<Τίποτε δεν απόμεινε στον κόσμο πια για μένα,
όλα βρωμούν τριγύρω μου και φαίνονται χεσμένα.
Όλα σκατά γενήκανε και ο δικός μου κώλος
σκατά εγίνηκε κι αυτός, σκατά ο κόσμος όλος.

Μόνο σκατά φυτρώνουνε στον τόπο αυτό τον άγονο
κι όλοι χεσμένοι είμαστε, σκατάδες στο τετράγωνο.
Μας έρχεται κάθε σκατάς, θαρρούμε πως σωθήκαμε,
μα μόλις φύγει βλέπομε πως αποσκατωθήκαμε.

Σκατά βρωμάει τούτος δω, σκατά βρωμά κι εκείνος,
σκατά βρωμάει το σκατό, σκατά βρωμά κι ο κρίνος.
Σκατά κι εγώ, μες στα σκατά, και με χαρτί χεσμένο
ό,τι κι αν γράψω σαν σκατό προβάλλει σκατωμένο.

Σκατά τα πάντα θεωρώ και χωρίς πια να απορώ,
σκατά μασώ, σκατά ρουφώ, σκατά πάω να χέσω,
απ’ τα σκατά θα σηκωθώ και στα σκατά θα πέσω.

Όταν πεθάνω χέστε με, τα κόλλυβά μου φάτε
Και πάλι ξαναχέστε με και πάλι ξαναφάτε,
μα απ’ τα γέλια τα πολλά κοντεύω ν’ αρρωστήσω
και δεν μπορώ να κρατηθώ, μου φεύγουν από πίσω.

Σκατά ο μεν, σκατά ο δε, σκατά ο κόσμος όλος
κι απ’ το πολύ το χέσιμο μου πόνεσε ο κώλος!>>

Νομίζω πως οι στίχοι του Γεωργίου Σουρή περιγράφουν επ' ακριβώς ολόκληρη την σπουδαιότητα της Ευρώπης, του Νέου Κόσμου και όλων αυτών των εγκλημάτων, ο Έλληνας ποιητής μάλλον θα αγκάλιαζε το έργο του Φλάναγκαν.

Και τα σκατα βλέπεις δεν είναι δική μου σπουδαία ιδέα, δεν είμαι μάλλον ούτε τόσο θαρραλέα ούτε και τόσο ευρηματική, ευχαριστώ λοιπόν για αυτό τον Φλάναγκαν και το Εγχειρίδιο Ιχθύων που υπήρξε για μένα εγκυκλοπαίδεια γνώσεων περισσότερης σκατοσύνης.

Όση Ευρώπη κι αν υψώσουμε τριγύρω μας είναι αδύνατον να κρυφτούμε από τα εγκλήματα μας,

από τις βάρκες που βουλιάζουν, από τον πόλεμο στην Ουκρανία,
από τις έμφυλες διακρίσεις, από τις ταξικές ανισότητες.

Διαβάστε το είπα;
Profile Image for Ron Charles.
1,147 reviews50.5k followers
December 19, 2013
Fish stories have a credibility problem. Even from the most trustworthy angler, they're slippery tales. When the teller is a forger, a liar, and a thief who admits that nothing he says can be believed, you're on guard. But when he confesses that he's also a fish, you're hooked.

Richard Flanagan has written a book that's THIS BIG, surely the slipperiest, most outrageous novel of the year. Who else would dare start with a 40-page preface that describes the story we're about to read as wondrous, luminous, and captivating? This is like setting off in the morning, promising to return for lunch with a dozen five-pound bass.

The narrator of this introduction, a con artist who makes "antique" furniture for American tourists, reports that when he first found "Gould's Book of Fish," its cover glowed with purple spots that spread up his arm. He notes that each chapter was written in different colored ink made from various body fluids and natural elements. "It was," he admits, "a dreadful hodgepodge" of paper, dried fish skin, sail cloth, and burlap, all of it swimming in a narrative "that never really started and never quite finished."

As he turns the pages feverishly, they grow damp, and when he's done, there's nothing left but a puddle on the table. Distraught over the loss and infected by "an unrequited love," he determines to rewrite "Gould's Book of Fish" himself.

The publisher, Grove/Atlantic, has obliged by printing the chapters in different colored inks just like the one that got away.

What follows this alternately lyrical and bombastic introduction is the weird and wild testimony of William Gould, a 19th-century convict on Sarah Island, the most notorious penal colony in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania), then the most notorious penal system in the world. This is, after all, a place where hairy devils shriek through the brush.

Gould is a forger imprisoned in a cage built below the tide line. Between the floodings that threaten to drown him twice a day, he manages to paint pictures for his jailer, who accepts them in exchange for a moldy piece of fat or a swift kick to the head. Since prisoners are forbidden to keep records of any kind, this chaotic journal of his life written with sea urchin spikes must be kept carefully hidden. (The dead man floating in his cell serves as the perfect companion: quiet and uncritical.)

The story Gould tells of the land way down under is absolutely captivating. But be forewarned, it's also scatological and shockingly violent -- a cringing nightmare inversion of the elegant British society that constructed this place.

The horror, the horror
Abandoned in a jungle far from civilization with thousands of criminals as their virtual slaves, the authorities on Sarah Island descend into the kind of madness that confirms Lord Acton's prediction about absolute power.

For a time, Gould is spared because his painting talent catches the eye of the colony's surgeon. Dr. Lempriere, a man almost as insane as his ravenous pet pig, believes that he can gain election to the Royal Society by producing an illustrated taxonomy of Tasmania's fish. This Dickensian character -- speaks broken phrases only -- CAPITAL LETTERS ALWAYS -- sets Gould to work producing watercolors, but those paintings lead to a commission from the ultimate authority.

With the Commandant, Flanagan dives into the waters of Swift and Conrad and causes a wake of allegorical satire that washes through history, racism, politics, and technology. The Commandant is a character as absurd as he is frightening, a man wholly unhinged by isolation, hubris, and syphilis. Determined to re-create the wonders of Europe on his 1-mile-square island, he whispers orders to his minions behind a gold mask, selling off everything they need to survive in order to finance his fantasies. Even his most ridiculous schemes -- such as building a lavish railroad station to attract trains from the mainland -- shimmer with ominous terror.

When the Commandant orders giant scenes of world vistas for his train to pass, Gould is happy to paint them. But his first love remains those sad sea creatures that splash through his mind continually. As symbols, the strange, big-eyed fish of Tasmania catch the light of a full spectrum of meanings, drawing him down into an ocean of sympathy big enough to wash away the differences between jailer and criminal, Aborigine and white, oppressor and oppressed.

Beyond Tasmania
Flanagan's previous novel, "Death of a River Guide," was a gorgeous, mystical history of Tasmania that transpires during the four minutes it takes its narrator to drown. "Gould's Book of Fish" is just as wet, but it swims in deeper waters. It may not win him a larger audience, but it will earn him a more passionate one. "There is something irretrievably fishy about us all," says Gould, recalling that the early Christians used the same humble, enigmatic symbol. Approaching the colony's apocalyptic finish, he realizes that "to love is not safe," but what choice does this fisher of men have?

As the narrative loops back on itself in a series of mind-bending post-structural tricks, Flanagan develops a grander and more ghastly vision that leaps beyond his country's history toward the biggest questions that love and language can pose. The current is dangerously strong here, but the water is irresistible, and once again Flanagan is a death-defying guide.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0328/p1...
Profile Image for Ben.
184 reviews290 followers
June 3, 2007
**SPOILERS AHEAD**

This is the second book in the past month (following Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist) where I've felt like the illustrious critics writing the glowing reviews that grace the jacket are like traders playing the futures market. There's no denying that Flanagan has great talent, but I'm not sure that Gould's Book of Fish is the masterpiece so many of the blurbs paint it to be, and it's certainly not (as one of them put it) "a partial answer to the question of the relative value of human existence."

There is lots of imagination at work in the Book of Fish. The reconstruction of the colonization of Tasmania is fevered and vivid if a bit myopic at times (Sarah Island often seemed as if it were the size of someone's backyard, and the overall claustrophobic nature of the book, while probably intended to a degree, was a bit too much for me).

The book's book about a book that's a reconstruction of a book that's a reconstruction of a book hook felt a bit familiar--kind of postmodern old hat at this point (the ghosts of House of Leaves, most of Eco's work, and Borges' "Pierre Menard," and even Delany's Dhalgren hang heavy). This book feels like it very much wants to be about narrative structure, but loses that thread for much of the middle before picking it up again in the Crayfish chapter when Gould discovers that the registers he'd kidnapped from the penitentiary office are in fact the manuscript that he himself is living. The afterword, which reveals Fight Club-style that Gould has himself been all of the characters he's described, wants desperately to be clever, but it really adds nothing to the content of the book. It should be suckerpunch but it just produces a bemused "...huh."

What I got from The Book of Fish, what I take to be its central meaning, is that all history is invented. The main character (both Gould and Hammett) is a forger. The book is an elaborate recreation of nothing that ever happened. The multiplicity of personalities are really all products of the mind of the (invisible) writer. This revelation alone is not worth the 400+ pages it took to deliver. The mediations on racism, self-delusion, and the general savagery of human existence take up the bulk of the novel but are really just the (occasionally relevant) padding around the existential framing questions.

I think Flanagan has it in him to write a Great Novel, but I don't think Book of Fish is it. It has great moments, great descriptions, some amusing or horrifying set-pieces, and a mostly good sense of place, but it feels like a dress-rehearsal for something truly significant. Too many of Flanagan's attempts at philosophical thought ring hollow or fall short of the meaning they're grasping for. Too many fragments go nowhere. I enjoyed reading it and will certainly look for other books by him, but I felt let down at the end.
Profile Image for Vaso.
1,649 reviews221 followers
June 2, 2022
3,5 αστέρια
Profile Image for Майя Ставитская.
2,142 reviews208 followers
August 29, 2021
Richard Flanagan has written an amazing postmodern novel. Amazing, because postmodern en mass is emotionless. This is a special place where the author frolics like a dolphin in the waves of stories that have been tested dozens and hundreds of times before in literature - while the reader would like to get into it, but the ineradicable artificiality repels him.

Not so with the "Book of Fish". From the very beginning, with the contrite statement that a person as he is, a master of his craft and a creator, with a fate like the plot of a novel, is less worthy of attention in the eyes of the public than a fake echo of "Moby Dick" (pastiche). Tourists are ready to buy a fake for carving on the bones of nineteenth-century whalers, but they will never pay for the same miniature, if they knew that it was carved by a Vietnamese (who sailed to blessed Australia literally on a nutshell, miraculously did not die, and saved his family, and now earns a fake, that is, fraud). Have each of us ever thought how nice it would be to legally earn money with what we have a talent for?

Моя рыба будет жить
Нет ничего проще, чем отказаться от памяти, и нет ничего трудней, чем хранить её.
Что вы знаете о Тасмании? Навскидку, без загугливания? Тасманский дьявол? Я до этой книги примерно так. Еще смутно, что это не то австралийский штат, не то остров у берегов Австралии. То и другое верно, и штат, и остров: чуть больше полумиллиона человек населения, чуть меньше шестидесяти восьми квадратных километров площадь, более полутора тысяч километров длина береговой линии. Место зарождения "зеленого" движения, много растений эндемиков и почти исчезнувшие эндемичные животные. Коренных тасманийцев не осталось совсем.

Хорошо, тогда с другой стороны, что об Австралии вообще? Наверняка больше. Кенгуру, коала, эму, аллигаторы. Крокодил Данди и всякое такое. А об освоении? Ну, каторжников туда ссылали, они и стали первыми колонистами. Несколько не то, что Америка с первопоселенцами пуританами, которые ехали основывать Новый свет - царство Божие на земле и сегодня если кто в Америке может сказать, что предки его прибыли на "Мэйфлауэре", это едва не пожизненная индульгенция. Австралия и Тасмания сильно не то. Оно конечно, корни, но гордиться предком уголовником, даже имея в виду, что на каторгу попадали и за украденный каравай (Салют, Вальжан), хм.

Еще золотая лихорадка пятидесятых позапрошлого века, мы же с вами книжные девочки и мальчики, "Светила" Каттон читали, хоть там и про Новую Зеландию, но все же рядышком и примерно одинаково. Да, хотя это будет позже, когда здешняя дикость понемногу начнет уступать место цивилизации в ее "wild-wild west" изводе. А самое начало, вот их привезли, и что было?

Забудьте буколические картины "Анжелики в Новом Свете" с работящими поселенцами строгих нравов, что сообща обживаются на новом месте, приспосабливаясь к нему. Здесь грубость, грязь, смрад, неустроенность, нехватка элементарных удобств и лютая ненависть всех ко всем лейтмотивом. Каторжники ненавидят надзирателей и туземцев. Взаимно. И не так просто разобраться, кто в сложившейся ситуации более несчастлив и менее виновен.

Ну как, аборигены, конечно. Жили себе, никого не трогали, даже с австралийцами не общались (там пролив Бассо). Приходят жестокие англичане, истребляют под корень. Угу но прежде они насаживали на копья беглых и торговали своими женщинами и детьми, обменивая их на собак, а чего, каждый мечтает о собаке, это нам еще Железников в детстве объяснил, а Лукьяненко в новой книжке подтвердил.

Каторжники еще. Условия, в которых им приходится жить, хуже скотских, бесправие совершенно, а надежды на гуманизм и соблюдение прав человека никакой. Рабский труд, скверная еда и одежда, антисанитария. И они шпионили друг за другом, доносили друг на друга, бичевали своего брата каторжанина и мочились на головы туземцев.

Если вы думаете. что довольны жизнью были свободные поселенцы, то тоже глубоко ошибаетесь. Это изгнание и жить в глухой провинции у моря здесь приходится совсем не в Бродском смысле. Тоска по родине, где жизнь и цивилизация против здешнего жалкого суррогата. Белые охотники на тюленей походя убивали и насиловали черных людей, а черные женщины душили рожденных от них детей.

Спустя три года после "Книги рыб Гоулда" другой житель австралийского континента, новозеландец Дэвид Митчелл напишет свой "Облачный атлас", и мы содрогнемся, узнав о том, как воинственные каннибалы маори учинили геноцид своих соседей миролюбивых мариори, и впервые задумаемся о том, что не белые моряки работорговцы рыскали по африканским джунглям за "черным деревом". Нет, рабов поставляли в обмен на ништяки соседи по континенту, не менее черные, но более технически развитые.

И мы подумаем, что прав Стивен Пинкер, Насилия в мире действительно становится меньше. Однако вернемся к нашим ба... рыбам. Ричард Фланаган написал удивительный постмодернистский роман. Удивительный, потому что постмодерн en mass безымоционален. Такое специальное место, где автор резвится дельфином в волнах сюжетов, десятки и сотни раз до того обкатанных в литературе - в то время как читатель и хотел бы проникнуться, да неистребимая искусственность отталкивает его.

Не то с "Книгой рыб". С самого начала, с сокрушенной констатации, что человек, как он есть, мастер своего дела и творец, с судьбой, как сюжет романа, в глазах публики менее достоин внимания, чем фейковый отголосок " Моби Дика" (пастиш). Туристы готовы покупать подделку под резьбу по кости китобоев девятнадцатого века, но нипочем не заплатят за ту же миниатюру, знай они, что вырезана вьетнамцем (который приплыл в благословенную Австралию буквально на ореховой скорлупке, чудом не погиб, и спас семью, и зарабатывает теперь подделкой, сиречь мошенничеством). Не думал ли каждый из нас когда-нибудь, как славно было бы легально зара��атывать тем, к чему имеем талант?

А после странная книга с рисунками рыб, наденная Сидом Хэмметом рассказчиком (пойоменон). Вообще, "Книга рыб" это книга о найденной книге, в которой герой пишет/иллюстрирует книгу, то и дело оказываясь во власти книг, в плену книг, в зависимости от книг, в обществе книг - в сочетании места/времени, замечу, где само понятие книги отчасти оксюморон.

И ты все время предельно эмоционально вовлечена в его фабуляции. Опознавая латиноамериканский магический реализм в сочетании с ироническими аллюзиями ко множеству персонажей и сюжетов, не в последнюю очередь русских, в прожектах Коменданта. Знает, не сомневайтесь, помните запечатленные на стенах Дворца Маджонга строки, которые Пушкин написал мисс Анне: "Судьбою здесь нам суждено в Европу прорубить окно"?

Здесь улыбаешься и киваешь, в другом месте содрогаешься от омерзения, сжимаешься от ужаса, плачешь, внутренне кричишь. Она не отпускает, эта книга, раз захватив тебя в плен. И да, она прекрасна еще и напоминанием, что все мы немножко рыбы, колокол всегда звонит по тебе, а из самой безвыходной ситуации есть по крайней мере один выход.

Когда-то, давным-давно, произошли страшные вещи, но случились они в давние времена, в дальних краях, а стало быть - каждый вам скажет - не здесь, не сейчас и не с нами.
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87 reviews58 followers
April 16, 2018
I struggled to read this. After a few pages I had to put it down and only returned to it a week or more later. Then down again. Finally I decided to wade through it to get it off my 'to read' list which I set myself for this year, and in the hope it improved and became something like 'For the term of his natural life' or other such historical fiction. (No pun intended.) Repetitive. The style of language and topics covered were not to my liking. It was disappointing as I am fascinated by sea life and fish. I love historical fiction normally and am an avid reader of Australian literature. I love art. The small snippets of interest in historical happenings is overtaken by crudeness and a lack of depth I expected in such a book that had good reviews. I completely skipped over the italicised sections and tried to find less rambling bits to redeem the book. None of the chapters seemed to go anywhere that tied into others. The end was disappointing. Not sure I really want to read any more of Flanagan's books but I already have one other downloaded so guess I'll try once more.
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