Reviewed with extreme prejudice: Gould’s book of Fish
(The perils of a good run of novels)

I have just finished Richard Flanagan’s “Gould’s Book of Fish”, and normally it’s the kind of work I’d review at some length. However, it’s on the Book Club of Intestinal Fortitude reading list, and I don’t want to prejudice other BCIF member’s reactions too much just yet. So, a few (hopefully) brief comments. This is a clever novel, and has one of the most intriguing premises in its first 40-odd pages that I’ve read in a while. I strongly recommend pages 1 - 45.

It’s central theme of forgery (or fraud) is interesting: fake antiques, forged art, the modern forging of historical records, the forging of records in 1828 to attempt to write (in advance) the future history of a penal settlement, the notion of the efforts of colonial government to recreate Europe in Australia as a particularly shabby act of forgery, and re-inventing yourself as a different person (or stealing someone else’s identity) – all make intriguing recurring elements and variations on a theme.

It also muses on the difference between (supposedly) aboriginal perspectives of time, being circular, and European concepts of time and progress, being linear. Unfortunately, I think this is used as an excuse to reject the need for a comprehensible plot or characterisation.

The voice of William Beulow Gould, and its rollicking, larrikin first-person narration, is an achievement: it is prose written by someone with a considerable talent.

But I don’t like it.

While much of the book is concerned with the artistic impulse by which the narrator transforms his miserable existence as a convict into the fish he paints (thus making the world fish) there is really a different transformation at work:

… the slime of rotting geranium petals was underfoot everywhere, the scent of pink dissolving into brown, the carnal transforming into the faecal.

Shit, thought the Commandant when the men he derided as traitorous mutineers had surrounded him & ordered him on pain of death to surrender, It’s all gone to shit.

This pretty much sums up the world Gould inhabits, where every aspiration is reduced to excrement.

I have no doubt convict life in Tasmania was nasty, brutish and short.

The problem with this technically clever novel is that it is nasty, brutish and long.

I look forward to the reaction of other BCIF members, provided I can still persuade anyone to stick with reading it. I think a novel that provokes strong reactions is good book club fodder, but we’ll see.

A large part of my problem with the novel is that I did not really enjoy the actual process of reading it, and had just come off a run off novels I really did enjoy. Things I lost sleep over, sitting up late and just turning pages until the wee smalls. Devouring the prose like I was hungry for it.

For example, Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections”, a really intriguing, layered social novel and exploration (or explosion?) of ideas about family – and a modern society where we take (illegal, legal or borderline) drugs for our every problem. A modern novel about big, difficult issues and ideas that has a story and characters who seem like real people. Why is that so much to ask for?

I followed that with Phillip Pullman’s entirely brilliant fantasy trilogy for adolescents, the “His Dark Materials” sequence (“The Golden Compass”, “The Subtle Knife” and “The Amber Spyglass”) – as exciting as Harry Potter, but much darker and prepared to tackle philosophical issues from the end of childhood to the death of God.

More recently I read Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History”, an elegant psychological thriller and study of murder and regret, littered with brilliant prose and compelling characters (even if they had Dickensian names, such as the cold, un-emotive Henry Winter).

All these novels had great plots, interesting action, compelling ideas, and portrayed a richly detailed world populated with memorable characters. They were “big” books, but intensely readable. Of these qualities I think “Gould’s Book of Fish” has only a detailed recreation of a particular world, strong ideas and technically brilliant (if not compellingly readable) prose going for it. I have been able to sustain interest in novels without much by way of characters or scintillating plots before, if I find the prose and the narrator’s voice sufficiently compelling (example: most of the work of Raymond Chandler), but somehow “Gould’s Book of Fish” failed to grab me.

Maybe that would have been enough if it hadn’t come as a disappointing final course to such a rich feast of other, better reading. But what do I know? Most critics have hailed it as a masterpiece, so maybe I’m out on a limb here.

Like I said, I’m looking forward to the BCIF discussion.

Comments? Put 'em here.