“Billy Gould could not escape the growing suspicion that he had become entrapped in a book, a character whose future as much as his past was already written, determined, foretold, as unalterable as it was intolerable. What choice did he have but to destroy that book?”
I’ve saved the most flummoxing book of the year for the last square on the bingo board: a book which involves metafiction and magical realism in convict-era Tasmania. Thanks, Richard Flanagan.
Gould’s Book of Fish has a convoluted framing narrative. Once upon a time there was a man called Sid Hammet and he discovered he was not who he thought he was.
Living in Hobart, Sid Hammet was working as a furniture forger making fake antiques for wealthy tourists when he stumbled upon an old book hidden under a pile of women’s gossip magazines. A book that did not smell like an old book, but of the sea; a book that did not sit there inert but gave off a faint purple glow.
This hodgepodge of a book was full of near incomprehensible writing—and many paintings of fish. It was supposedly put together (or constructed, it seems to defy the more obvious past participle ‘written’ here) by William Buelow Gould back in 1828. Very quickly, Hammet became infatuated with the book of fish, no matter how emphatically others dismissed it as a fraud or a forgery on the level of Hammet’s own furniture.
Then, after a couple too many beers, he left it at the bar when he went to take a slash and the book of fish vanished!
Who was William Buelow Gould? A convict transported to Sarah Island, Gould was commissioned, ‘in the supposed interest of science’ to paint the fish found in the surrounding waters. The pivot from Hammet’s to Gould’s point of view is not simple; the narrative flicks between flashbacks and flash forwards, and it quickly becomes obvious that Gould is not a reliable narrator. He’s not even being truly honest about his name; he stole the surname from an engraver “for which he nor his daughter any longer had use”
Gould’s life is colorful, to say the least. Prior to his deportation, Gould bounced between London and America, where he learnt to paint and commit forgery. Once he lands in Tasmania, he does his best to make himself indispensable to the people around him in an effort to at least survive. One of the more notable people Gould attaches himself to the prison surgeon Tobias Lempriere, who is very desperate to become a fellow of the Royal Society. He is the man who commissions the paintings of the fish. Flanagan has quite the knack for writing colorful descriptions of his characters, but he really goes above and beyond when describing Lempriere, whose interest in fish and love of taxonomy kind of follows a similar trajectory to that of David Starr Jordan. Which honestly, being a colonialist in 1820’s Tasmania, I should have expected. For added absurdity, Lempriere also speaks in all caps in the same manner as Terry Prachett’s Death. He is a comically horrible man, who thankfully, gets the over-the-top fate he deserves.
Lempriere is not exactly an outlier though; while Gould himself comes across as slightly whimsical with a side of black humor, many of the other people who Gould meets carry similarly comical and casually cruel ideas as the surgeon. However, the barbarity of the penal colony at Sarah Island is not subject to the same exaggerations—this was real. It would be tempting to dismiss the violence as a product of magical realism, but no, even when compared to Australia’s other penal colonies, Sarah Island had a black reputation.
That violence was real. But what about the people? The further you read, the more the Book of Fish becomes metafictional. There really was once a man named William Beulow Gould, and he really did paint fish. There is a genuine book of fish—the Sketchbook of Fishes—that he authored, that apparently exists in the state library of Tasmania. Several other characters, namely Matt Brady, Jorgen Jorgensen, and of course, Governor Arthur, also have historical counterparts. And while there was never a Tobias Lempriere, there was a Thomas Lempriere*, who was a British colonial administrator in Tasmania throughout the 1820s and 30s. Who, funnily enough, was also a painter. While some other characters are clearly fictional, we have to ask, are they just creations of Richard Flanagan, or of the author Richard Flanagan writing as William Buelow Gould? Why is it that our fictional Gould runs into so many shysters and hucksters such as himself? Why is it that his stories blend into theirs? How much of this is actually Sid Hammet, filling in the gaps?
Is this all secretly a homage to Moby Dick?
Make no mistake, this is a challenging book. And one that I’ll have to re-read at some point. Not just because I feel I’ve missed a couple of things, but because the I don’t think the greyscale version I read on my ereader has done the little pictures of fish justice.
It’s a lot. And honestly? It’s not really about the fish.
For cbr17bingo, this is Arts. And thats a blackout.