Gould's Book Of Fish: A Novel In Twelve Fish (2003) - Plot & Excerpts
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.
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."
What do You think about Gould's Book Of Fish: A Novel In Twelve Fish (2003)?
La sfârșitul acestui roman, după ultima frază care dă un cu totul alt sens poveștii, am simțit nevoia să o iau de la capăt - dar n-am făcut-o, pentru că Gould's Book of Fish m-a stors deja de puteri. Pe cât de dificilă și de chinuitoare a fost lectura, pe atât de intensă și de obsedantă a fost povestea. Frumoasă, minunată - nu, nu a fost așa. A fost sumbră, densă, un adevărat labirint de personaje și întâmplări care se năruie spre final, când elementele poveștii nu se mai potrivesc, iar înțelegerea noastră se clatină și ne aruncă în confuzie. Chiar dacă nu totul este extraordinar la această carte, scriitura excelentă a lui Flanagan și atmosfera obsedantă pe care o creează au făcut din Gould's Book of Fish unul dintre cele mai bune romane pe care le-am citit până acum. Unele pasaje sunt adevărate opere de artă, în felul în care scriitorul îmbină cuvintele, sensul, ritmul, muzicalitatea. Cu un limbaj care trece de la sordid la lirism, de la oroare la umor și de la registrul grotesc la cugetări filozofice, autorul reușește un tur de forță cum rar mi-a fost dat să cunosc. Însă toată această putere hipnotică a scriiturii se poate simți doar în original, căci traducerea românească face un mare deserviciu romanului (dar despre asta îmi vărs năduful pe blog).William Buelow Gould - bețiv, falsificator, pușcăriaș, Artist. Dacă viața de șarlatan nu l-ar fi adus, împotriva voinței lui, din Anglia secolului XIX în închisorile din Tasmania, poate că nu ar fi pictat niciodată peștii ce i-au asigurat ulterior nemurirea - căci acest William Buelow Gould, pe care Richard Flanagan îl readuce la viață într-o poveste nebunească, a fost un om în carne și oase. Picturile lui cu pești, create într-una din cele mai crunte colonii penitenciare ale Imperiului Britanic, fac parte astăzi din patrimoniul UNESCO. Extraordinar, nu-i așa? Acest fapt nu este menționat explicit în roman, dar povestea capătă o cu totul altă dimensiune știind de la bun început că protagonistul a existat în realitate. Însă Richard Flanagan nu ne menține prea mult timp pe tărâmul realității - cu o imaginație debordantă, susținută de o scriitură puternică, autorul ne poartă într-o aventură la granița irealului, construind o istorie alternativă, încărcată de simboluri, a țării sale natale.Pe lângă povestea ficționalizată a lui William Buelow Gould, Richard Flanagan reconstituie o parte din istoria colonizării Tasmaniei (Țara lui Van Diemen pe numele european), care, la începutul secolului XIX, era o întindere necunoscută populată de aborigeni - hăituiți și nimiciți în final de colonizatori și vânătorii de balene. Pe atunci, orașul Hobart devenise o adevărată colonie a artiștilor, transportați în Australia pentru diferite crime care astăzi par minore, dar în acele vremuri erau aspru pedepsite de Imperiul Britanic (șapte ani de închisoare în colonii pentru furtul unor perechi de pantofi). Dacă aveți chef de citit mai mult decât atât, varianta lungă se află pe blog:http://lecturile-emei.blogspot.ro/201...
—Ema
I'm not sure what the point of this book was. It started with such an intriguing premise: the unnamed narrator finds a seemingly incomprehensible book, called The Book of Fish, written and illustrated by a convict. He becomes obsessed with it and can't stop reading it, until one day it dissolves into a pile of salt water. And that's where I lost interest.Look, I'm all for learning about local history, especially as Tasmania is a place I don't know much about. I was not impressed, then, when what I expected to be a reasonably accurate and creative 'meta-book' turned out to be so much drivel disguised as substance. I could've overlooked the gimmicky coloured type and the underwhelming sketches of fish, were it not for the lack of emotional connection I felt towards Gould. Yes, there were some memorable moments, such as the description of a convict being crushed and killed by a machine. But these were lost in the bloated prose.But the prologue leads us to expect incoherency, you say. Of course it does, but there are ways to explore that without spewing mindless prose: the character is supposed to be incoherent, not the author. Any message the book has is probably evident in the last few pages, when the author waxes poetic about how we all eventually float into the ocean and turn into fish, and swim away in blissful ignorance. It's actually the best writing in the book, and if Flanagan had stopped showing off and invested in an editor, the rest of this book might've lived up to that quality.
—Tanvi
This novel is unique in my experience. Well-written and constructed, it is a very appealing book. In an amazing fashion it tells a fascinating story of the lives of prisoners in nineteenth century Tasmania. It is told in the form of a book within a book, as the original "Illuminated" text morphs into the story of Billy Gould, an itinerant painter whose journeys end badly. The novel is a mix of meditations and wild stories, jumping to and fro, each outlandish scene to be superseded by one stranger still. Along the way he even encounters another painter, John James Audubon. The book itself is beautiful and the story is a delight even as the author's style overwhelmed me.
—James
