"My wonder upon discovering the 'Book of Fish' remains with me yet."
Richard Flanagan's opening line may resonate with readers as they polish off the final sentence of his novel "Gould's Book of Fish."
The "Book of Fish," a book within the book, is discovered in a junk shop by Sid Hammet, an amiable con man in Tasmania, who makes a sort of living ("if it wasn't that good, nor was it all that bad") bilking porky American tourists by selling them old crap marketed as "antiques."
Digging through a pile of ratty-tatty women's magazines, Hammet finds a book that positively glows, I tell ya -- a frenzied narrative interspersed with fabulous watercolors of sea life. Upon opening this dizzying mad rush of a book, Hammet is hooked!
"It was, I must admit, a dreadful hodgepodge, what with some stories in ink layered higgledy-piggledy over others in pencil, and sometimes vice versa. Upon running out of space at the end of the book, the writer seemed to have simply turned it around and, between the existing lines, resumed writing -- in the opposite direction and upside down -- more of his tales. ... The sum of such chaos was that I seemed to be reading a book that never really started and never quite finished."
He takes his find to be appraised by historians and publishers and experts who judge the book a very colorful fraud -- a fish story, as it were -- "the insignificant if somewhat curious product of a particularly deranged mind of long ago."
That mind belongs to William Buelow Gould, a convict sentenced to Van Diemen's Land. Some of you may recognize from imperial history the name of an infamous British prison colony. Some of you may have just heard the U2 song.
Gould's story becomes an obsession for Hammet, who persists in trying to get it recognized in the face of derision, critical abuse and drubbings at the pub. Then, just like the one that got away, the "Book of Fish" is gone, vanished from the bartop where Hammet left it on a trip to the toilet. Meaningful to no one but him, the story bubbles and boils in Hammet's fevered brain until he sets out to re-create the "Book of Fish" from memory. This tale, filtered through the perspective of two madmen (three if you count Flanagan), is slightly divergent from the history of Gould you'd find on the Wikipedia (which never lies).
Gould arrives in Van Diemen's Land in the 1800s, condemned not to a relatively quick death by hanging but to a relentless life in hell. The prison shipyards are ruled by the Commandant, driven mad by a prodigious intake of mercury, laudanum and opium and by an ambition "as enormous as his appetites, both dietary & carnal, & it was no less than the creation of a nation that would have as its heart the city-state he was already building the foundations for, with him for its Father." The Commandant's port settlement is populated by lunatics, grotesques and the scum of England forced into slave labor.
In his leisure time, when he's not being beaten or half-drowned in his seaside cell below the high water mark, Gould writes about his life in bondage. "It had simply become a bad habit, as inescapable & as wretched as scratching my licy balls."
Such accounts by convicts are forbidden by law and risk savage punishment. Using purloined bits of paper and blood picked from his own scabby flesh, Gould creates his defiant art. "If I had a bottle of good Indian ink, I'd be a hell of a lot happier, & in somewhat less pain. On the other hand, mine is far from a black & white story, so perhaps putting it down in a scarlet fashion is not so inappropriate. Please don't be appalled, compared to most of the vile crap that comes out of my body these days ... my blood is really quite pure & beautiful, & it reminds me that something is always pure & beautiful, if you will just look beneath the scabs & sores."
Gould is allowed by his captors to paint. He shows a certain talent for artistic forgeries that can be exported and sold and for still lifes that British officials can present to their mistresses as gifts. And for fish: In his painting, Gould finds subtle, undetectable ways to reflect the horrors of his surroundings. His piscine portraits express "my own fear at this cracked world in which I & they & everything was trapped."
Gould's work catches the eye of Tobias Achilles Lempriere, a corpulent, grub-like surgeon who appreciates the "scientifick" detail. The Surgeon recruits Gould in an effort to catalog Nature, starting with the fish, in preparation for that grand day when science supplants art and assumes its rightful supremacy in the mind of enlightened man.
Gould guzzles the Surgeon's rum and nods a lot.
"It sounded suspiciously like an attempt by the Surgeon ... to recreate the natural world as a penal colony, with me, the gaoled, now to play the part of turnkey. Still, I had had worse offers."
But Gould finds his assignment taking on a personal meaning. It's more than a means to escape arbitrary floggings. He begins to take the job seriously, at least the artistic aspects of it. He's making an honest effort to capture the essence of fish.
As Gould's talents develop, the Commandant's insanity progresses:
"The more he advanced in his belief in his manifest destiny, the more he declined in the practice of sense. His talk became of impossibilities -- of building a temple of odours; of lifting the Penitentiary into the air by the power of levitation, so escape would be impossible except in balloons; of developing mesmerism as an offensive weapon for his army by raising a regiment of spiritualists who would stand in the front row of great battles willing the other side to lose."
The Commandant borrows Gould from the Surgeon to record in a series of elaborate murals the glories of the Commandant's would-be empire. While sidelined from his fish study, the Surgeon loses his spirit for the project (along with some other beloved equipment), turning instead to the harvesting of Aboriginal heads for study.
But Gould can't let the fish go. The painting of sea life is no longer a simple shelter against sadism. Gould's art has become an obsession, an essential -- and endlessly frustrating -- sustenance.
"The more I looked at those sad creatures, still dying, the occasional mortal flap of the tail or desperate heave of the gills signaling their silent horror was not yet ended, the more I looked into the endless recesses of their eyes, the more something of them began to pass into me" while "some small part of me, without me willing it, was beginning a long, fateful journey into them!"
His painting is his life, the only thing he has left, the only thing he cares about. And in this setting of merciless suffering, an awakening of passion through art is dangerous, perhaps even deadly.
"I knew in order to survive & prosper it was important to feel nothing for anyone or anything, & I knew I wanted to survive & prosper. But because of my newfound proximity to what hitherto had been little more than stench wrapped in slime & scale, I began to dream that there was nothing in the extraordinary universe opening up in front of me, not a man or woman, not a plant or tree, not a bird or fish, to which I might be allowed to continue remaining indifferent."
"Gould's" is a good book to experience with a buddy -- providing your buddy is of stern constitution and not easily repulsed. Flanagan is so clever and puckish in his wordplay that there are passages that could be read one way or could be read another and were probably intended to support multiple interpretations.
"As with the skin of a bastard trumpeter caught at night, the book's cover was now a mass of pulsing purple spots."
That sentence may bring to mind a "Jackass"-type prankster/musician thrashed black and blue by a mob of angry, interrupted slumberers. But there is also a trumpeter fish that glows purple in the dark. Shakespeare, an incorrigible punster, might have liked that one.
And even if all of us in the audience are wrong, it's all part of the natural process of writing and reading.
"A book at its beginning may be a new way of understanding life -- an original universe -- but it is soon enough no more than a mere footnote in the history of writing, overpraised by the sycophantic, despised by the contemporary, and read by neither. Their fate is hard, their destiny absurd. If readers ignore them they die, and if granted the thumbs-up of posterity they are destined forever to be misconstrued."
Gould's plight as an artist goes beyond mere miscommunication issues. His account flies in the face of an unassailable official record that praises the European conquerors for their compassion, nobility and the unflagging, saintly patience required by the endeavor to enlighten Australia's savages and England's societal dregs. In the only history that counts, the written word -- a great power for liberation -- is malignantly warped to enslave.
Flanagan philosophizes about the simultaneous futility and absolute necessity of artistic expression. Each of us lives in our own little bubble of perception, and no one, no matter how intimate, sees the outside world exactly the way we do. Or sees us the way we see ourselves. Art -- imperfect, open-to-interpretation-by-idiots art -- is perhaps the best bridge between bubbles that we have. As badly as I believe I've fumbled this review, I kept writing. I've failed to convey how exciting and special (and heinously gruesome) this book is, but I had to take a shot at it in the hopes of luring new readers for Flanagan to shake and shock and amaze and engage. Some of us feel a compulsion to communicate that's unsatisfied by a click of the Like button or an emoticon. Often such communication is a failure.
But we keep casting our lines.
"Maybe we have lost the ability, that sixth sense that allows us to see miracles and have visions and understand that we are something other, larger than what we have been told." -- Richard Flanagan by way of Sid Hammet (or maybe it's the other way around)
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- Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2014
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Top reviews from other countries
- djtaylor65Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 6, 2024
Billy Gould who’s name is a song that will be sung
- margaret visciglioReviewed in Australia on December 1, 2014
The writing is amazing in its scope
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