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

Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish by Richard Flanagan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In penal colony era Tasmania, on an island that served as a notorious prison, a prisoner called William Gould painted a series of striking images of the local fish. In a way analogous to what Audubon did for birds, he left behind a scientific and artistic document, but he did so in strikingly difficult circumstances.

That much is historical fact, and you can see reproductions of the fish on the cover of the edition of the novel Richard Flanagan has written around that fact. Flanagan being Flanagan, though – and, for shorthand, I’ll call Flanagan simply one of the handful of the most talented novelists in the world – that’s only the tip of a remarkably imagined world, one that calls into question the limits of art to reproduce reality and, further, the limits of human perception in a world that extends in nearly infinite directions.

Flanagan opens this with an invented frame narrative. His narrator, a two-bit confidence man and forger, claims to stumble upon a second copy of Gould’s fish, a book in which Gould recorded text alongside re-paintings of the now-famous fish. He’s taken by it enough to show it to others – including some academics who ought to be able to authenticate it but remain skeptical – and then he has it stolen.

The book we get thereafter, then, is “Ronnie’s” effort to reproduce from memory a book that Gould supposedly wrote 170 years before. At a first level, then, we’re called on to doubt the product. (And, if I have a complaint here – and it’s barely a complaint by the end – I’d like to see Flanagan gesture more often throughout the book toward that original framing concept.)

The book we get, though, is itself an acknowledged warping of the world of the Sarah Island penal colony. It becomes before long an utterly bizarre narrative of what happens when power corrupts a handful of men who believe in a kind of manifest destiny. The Commandant, above all, emerges as a kind of comic Thomas Sutpen (from Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom) as he enters into state-level commerce, selling off whole swaths of virgin forest, building massive entertainment and government centers and hoarding fine art.

There are others, though, including an old Danish man who claims royal descent and who writes a massive “straight” history of the madness to cover for the fraud, a doctor and would-be scientist who sets Gould on his job of painting fish and who keeps a massive pig for his pet, and a native woman who bewitches virtually every man in the story. By the time we’re halfway into this, the only novel I can think to compare it to is Catch-22 for the way both capture vast systems of madness that depend on absurd characters to make them work. Both are a sustained effort to impose an arbitrary and senseless order on top of a deeper chaos.

And, yes, this is as morbidly funny as Catch-22 – which is no slight to Joseph Heller. [SPOILER] One of the funniest scenes here comes when, as Gould returns to Dr. Lempriere to persuade him for more paints to continue the scientific project, he discovers instead a massive turd in the center of which is Lempriere’s belt buckle. There’s no horror to the recognition that the man has just been consumed (and then shat out) by his own pet. Instead, the first impulse is to admire the turd itself as one more larger than life element of the place.

As with Catch-22 as well, though, the humor rests on a deeper critique of power and blindness. Part of the anger that Gould experiences comes from the fundamental inhumanity of the place. Characters think nothing of massacring natives or of torturing convicts. The handful who have power, in terms of money or military might, use it without conscience, without even a sense that the other is human. However much Flanagan reimagines that, we know it to be fundamentally true of the penal system.

The deeper joy of this conception is that we’re called on to recognize the impossibility of recovering that long-ago experience. All of the narrative could be Ronnie’s forgery, so we have an ever-present suggestion to ignore everything as a fantastic account. We also have the sense that the Dane is writing an official history, a record of the experience that satisfies the demands of the people back in England, and that that account is what stands in the way of history fully understanding the experience of Sarah Island. [SPOILERS: That said, many of the Dane’s official records are eventually burned, and – separately – most of the great buildings and wealth of the Commandant are destroyed as well. The point is, we’re told that only memory and imagination remain to give witness to what happened or did not happen.]

As if all that weren’t enough, Flanagan gives us what I find is his characteristic end-of-the-novel re-reckoning. (He uses a similar effect in most of his others, most successfully in his most recent, First Person.) As the world of Sarah Island falls apart, as Gould [SPOILER] attempts an ambitious escape in the midst of much death and destruction, he finds himself losing a large part of his humanity. He finds, that is, that he is beginning to see the world as a fish. The strangeness of that perspective shifts everything he thought he understood about the world, and it adds a note of magical realism to his supposed death by drowning at the very end when he explain that he has convinced himself he will be able to breathe underwater once he takes the plunge.

Somehow, all of that takes place in text, in language that Flanagan pushes to the breaking point. That makes for a sloppy ending, but that’s true of Catch-22 as well. Instead, we’re left with a sense of Gould’s ambition to capture a piece of a dramatic new world, of Ronnie’s fascination with Gould and his effort to reconstruct the loss of Gould’s book, and of Flanagan for creating the whole spectacle himself.

So, yeah, read this. That said, if you haven’t tried Flanagan yet, I recommend starting with The Narrow Road to the Deep North. That’s still the masterpiece, with First Person and The Sound of One Hand Clapping following. I find this stronger than Death of a River Guide – which is also very good for much of the way – and better than the one clunker Flanagan I’ve read, The Unknown Terrorist. I have just Wanting to get to, and then I’ll have to re-read or wait patiently for the next from a guy who is increasingly my candidate for the Nobel in literature.


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