"Gould's Book of Fish" Impressions

First thing: I really enjoyed this book.

After that, I'm not really sure where to start. The brutality, barbarism and oppression that you mention, dad, was probably less shocking and more muted for me, as the book I'd read previously was Mo Yan's The Garlic Ballads. That book has a more realistically rendered fantasy world of dehumanizing brutality, with the added "benefit" that the brutality was both more often and more vivid. Here, though, they seemed more a symptom, that feeling that when facing the great unknown, the only way Englishmen know how to react is with some good ol' brutality. Those settings for me just represent the archetype of violent, oppressive control, the need for it...its just the way the West reacts initially to vast tracts of wilderness: it brings out the worst fears, and therefore, the worst reactions...that, and we're talking about Australians here (but of course in 1830 they'd still be mostly Englishmen).

I dunno. Sometimes I get the feeling that vast wilderness and unknown being met by early colonists of from the West are met with fear, which translates into "those stupid trees and natives will know we're the boss" style brutality. They just go together for me.

Australians, like Americans, have a nice colorful history to look back upon.

The speed with which readers are thrust into something mesmerizing in that opening chapter is crazy. We're introduced to a narrator, a petty swindler and criminal, in and out of the system, and he and his probation officer and some friends make a nice buck selling false antiques to tourists on Tasmania. The narrator makes the distinction that it's the story that they're selling more than the junk. From there he finds an old book while out shopping for other things he and his pals can distress and sell.

I was explaining to Corrie the setup in slightly more detail than here, and she stopped me and asked How far have you read? and I honestly answered Just the first chapter. It goes from making you smirk to making you wonder to being weird to gripping you all before it spends the next 300+ pages in some of the most outlandish settings put to paper. The years: the late 1820s. The place: Van Diemen's Land, later renamed Tasmania, and specifically, the very real and horrific prison colony on Sarah Island, a square mile of rock in Macquarie Harbor. Many bits of Australian lore are woven in as well, like Matt Brady, an infamous bushranger.

A book is being scribbled in secret using fish bone quills and whatever coloring can be mustered (urchin; blood; feces) by a man in a cell that floods with the tides everyday. At some point everyday this prisoner is floating at the top of his room. That's how the old timey part starts.

We get all sorts of shenanigans from our new narrator, the forger and fake painter calling himself Gould. In the real world there was a prisoner named William Buelow Gould, and he was really commissioned to paint fish during his time at a prison colony, and, in reality, the book of fish he painted does exist in the same museum where our first narrator visits in the first chapter. This novel is like an imagined story of this man Gould's imagined life. Pardon the redundancy.

Each chapter is named for a fish, and that fish represents one of the characters prominent in that chapter's shenanigans. Each edition of Flanagan's novel uses actual Gould paintings, on the cover and throughout.

Dad, did you know the character Capois Death is based on a real person (mostly)? I had to look it up.

Norm, if you get to this post, there is definitely a strain of Pynchon running through, but it's flavored differently, and not just a Tasmanian styled Pynchon. Recognizable as from the same spectrum of Out There Lit. You know who you are... But it is written in a similar fashion to Mason & Dixon in that it uses contemporary 1820s phrasing, slang, and punctuation. Of course it's not as densely constructed as M&D.

Gould's Book of Fish will be with me for a very long time. It pulls together many threads dealing with reality, history and connections, the power of animals, and the power of words. That, and the scenarios and scenes are so engaging and bizarre that someone like me, an aspiring writer who's working on a long piece of fiction, can only be inspired that my own bizarre scenarios and scenes might actually work, and maybe even be well received.

I really enjoyed this book.