Just finished reading an amazing novel, Gould's Book of Fish by the Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan. It's so good, so boldly imagined and thoroughly realized, that it's hard to say anything about it. You can sort of articulate what it's about, I suppose: It's about a penal colony in Tasmania in the 1820s, it's about colonialism and the illusions of enlightenment and science and civilization and their cruel byproducts. It's about the slaughterhouse that is history and the countless lives erased by official histories. It's about storytelling - the luminously crude and often gorgeous language is an uninterrupted romp, though at times you want to hide in the language to avoid the mad savageries described. It's about imagination, about art, about the powers and seductions of language, and the mystery of love.
And it's about fish, a book of fish painted by a convict: I've included the pics of the silver dory, the striped cowfish, the stargazer, and the weedy seadragon. The convict was a forger named, among other things, William Buelow Gould. (The forger seems a common character in Australian fiction about the convict settlements, understandably enough, but this fellow takes the cake. Besides, he really existed, or at least the book of paintings does, in the Tasmanian State Library!) The fish start to take over Billy Gould's mind, their bizarre but beautiful shapes becoming metaphors for the characters he describes, the distorted grotesques of humanity (if it is still humanity) produced in as ultimately antihuman a system as the colonial with its delusions of finally facilitating the birth of a true human civilization. Is it easier for a man to live his life as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human?" But that makes it sound like a sermon, which it isn't: it's too angry, and too intoxicated by the thrill of imagining. Billy Gould is clearly mad - or is it that he transforms what he reimagines with such a mad clarity that it reveals a truth deeper than the truth, a truth more terrifying than truth dares face?
More skilled critics than I are made to grope for words by this book, too ("a work of significant genius" said a tongue-tied critic for the Chicago Tribune, whatever that means, and yet I feel the critic's pain), and note affinities with Rabelais, Smollett, Sterne, Melville, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, Garcia Marquez, Jim Crace, Toni Morrison, Jeannette Winterson. A pretty terrifying roster - don't let it put you off. I've read quite a lot of Australian literature by now; this is in a league of its own. Not light reading, but brilliant.It's not just that it ends, with an improbability that is entirely convincing (not the very end, and also not a spoiler for novel):
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.
I wished to be & I was not & so I tried to write this world as a book of fish & set it to rights in the only manner I knew how. But my way was meaningless, my cries unheard, my pictures spat on before they were lost for all eternity. Now I just watch & think the ridiculous, the improbable: the world is good, I think, & the world is good & the world is good.
...
