Product Description

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...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60143 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 404 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
With a title such as Gould's Book of Fish, Richard Flanagan's Commonwealth Prize-winning third novel, expect something wonderfully slippery and self-conscious from one of the finest talents to have emerged from Australia since Peter Carey. Like Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, Flanagan has written a history of a lost colonial voice--that of William Buelow Gould, a "pathetick forger, this drunkard trying his best to be on the make" who in the 1820s was sentenced to hard labour on the brutal penal colony of Sarah Island, "a silver sea monster of fable rearing its terrible head" off the coast of Van Dieman's Land--present-day Tasmania.

Finding himself at the mercy of a brutal and insane colonial regime that indulges its bizarre fantasies whatever the cost to the inmates, Gould finds himself commissioned to paint fish indigenous to the island. Gould's beautiful book of fish survives to this day, and his pictures are part of the exquisite design of Flanagan's book, which attempts to reproduce the original feel of Gould's book. But this is the novel's last connection to reality. Gould's fish, with their "coloring & surfaces & translucent fins suggest the very reason and riddle of life". Gould begins to realise that "a fish is a truth", and gradually his own pictures become a point of resistance to the ruthless classification and surveillance that characterises life on the penal colony. The book is a picaresque fantasy that encompasses art, science, empire and commerce, as well as sex, murder, liberation, castration, bestiality and a whole host of even more unlikely topics. The writing is extraordinary--luminous, sinewy, at times hilarious, often gruesome. Sometimes Flanagan goes too far, as his linguistic pyrotechnics feel like a parody of Sterne or Rabelais, but there can be no doubt that Gould's Book of Fish is a marvellously ambitious novel from a writer with enviable raw talent. --Jerry Brotton

John Burnside, The Times
‘Gould’s Book of Fish is a masterpiece’

New York Times
'Gould's Book of Fish is a novel about fish the way Moby-Dick is a novel about whales, or Ulysses is a novel about the events of a single day'

Customer Reviews

"Only a madman would open it . . ."
All the stars in Amazon's firmament aren't sufficient award for this masterpiece. Flanagan uses nested metaphors like the famous Russian dolls, each exposing a new level of the same theme. Here the theme is the perception of the written word. Which of the stories told here is the valid one? Are all of them real, or all false? Lest this sound confusing, reader, take heart. Flanagan is a master storyteller and all he asks of you is a bit of patience while he unravels the life of a man beset by forces of breathtaking scope. After all, he is presenting you with the world of the British Empire.

Will a valid history of that Empire ever be written? Flanagan makes no such claim. He views its immensity from a tiny salient through the eyes of one its outcasts. William Buelow Gould is a man whose perception becomes increasingly distorted in a place that could break the strongest mind. Macquarie Harbour was a dumping ground for "hard case" convicts. Here, a thirty-two year old appears dismayingly aged. Here, all were "cobbers and dobbers" - men were mates ranged against prison authority but turning traitor against each other ["dobbing in"] when survival was the issue. Gould, an artist-forger, seems spared the worst effects of The System when he's posted to the colony's surgeon to produce watercolours of the local marine life. In this role, Flanagan takes us on a tour of "scientifick" thought of the time and its impact on people on the far reaches of the Empire - which spans the planet. Phrenology, evolution, religion of the time come to light from his skilled prose.

Gould, ever a pawn on The System's board, is taken from the surgeon to embark on a fresh enterprise. The prison Commandant has a commission for him. Gould's new project reflects the Commandant's ambitions for the colony, but we witness a new attitude in Gould as the story develops. What truly happened in this place bracketed by screaming winds and a mountain wilderness that inhibited dreams of escape? Flanagan makes Gould the only valid witness to events - at least the only one leaving a record. Can we, however, trust the words of someone recording so many irrational acts? Gould assures us: "if you can't trust a liar & a forger, a whore & an informer, a convicted murderer & a thief, you'll never understand this country." To Flanagan, that statement sums up the dilemma of Australia. Whose account of history are we to believe?

Gould is ultimately convicted of a bizarre murder and placed in a cell inundated by each day's tide. Using his marine paintings he begins the chronicle of his life in the colony. His Book of Fish, however, ranges far beyond simply a journal of events illustrated with symbolic watercolours. Flanagan assaults all written accounts as deceptive, even questioning the validity of the most mundane of books - a prison registry. The registry becomes a pivot around which Flanagan twists a skein of questions of human values. More than simply historical "truth" is under scrutiny here. What price are we prepared to pay in resolving "scientifick" issues? How can we categorize our fellow humans when we know, as Aborigine Twopenny Sal tells Gould, "Long time before, you were us." Human ancestry lies in Africa, not London, Sydney or even Ottawa. These questions haunt Gould throughout the book, and Flanagan wants them to haunt you a bit, as well. Read him and ponder them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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