Winner of the Commonwealth Prize New York Times Book Review--Notable Fiction 2002
Entertainment Weekly--Best Fiction of 2002
Los Angeles Times Book Review--Best of the Best 2002
Washington Post Book World--Raves 2002
Chicago Tribune--Favorite Books of 2002
Christian Science Monitor--Best Books 2002
Publishers Weekly--Best Books of 2002
The Cleveland Plain Dealer--Year's Best Books
Minneapolis Star Tribune--Standout Books of 2002
Once upon a time, when the earth was still young, before the fish in the sea and all the living things on land began to be destroyed, a man named William Buelow Gould was sentenced to life imprisonment at the most feared penal colony in the British Empire, and there ordered to paint a book of fish. He fell in love with the black mistress of the warder and discovered too late that to love is not safe; he attempted to keep a record of the strange reality he saw in prison, only to realize that history is not written by those who are ruled.
Acclaimed as a masterpiece around the world,
Gould's Book of Fish is at once a marvelously imagined epic of nineteenth-century Australia and a contemporary fable, a tale of horror, and a celebration of love, all transformed by a convict painter into pictures of fish.
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
