Gould's Book of Fish

Description:
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.

Praise:
“Gould’s Book of Fish is a novel about fish the way Moby-Dick is a novel about whales, or Ulysses is a novel about the events of a single day. . . . a wondrous, phantasmagorical meditation on art and history and nature; a surreal examination of the parlous consequences of British colonialism and the ambivalent legacy of the French Enlightenment; a fantastic tale . . . a novel that weds the cacophonous digressions and philosophical asides of Tristram Shandy to the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez; a novel that welds a Joycean love of language to a billowing, Melvillian vision of the world.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Richard Flanagan has created an astonishing masterpiece that challenges, provokes and entertains at every turn… Chock full of ideas, exuberant language, indelible images and borrowings that echo the classics of world literature, from the fiction of Fielding, Sterne and Dickens right through Joyce, Borges and Thomas Pynchon.” —Brad Zellar, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“A great book, by turns bawdy and pensive, moving and abrasive, visionary and squalid, apocalyptic and confessional. . . . Obviously this sort of thing requires and ambitious imaginative reach and a convincing narrative voice, qualities that Flanagan distills masterfully into Gould’s account of a searching and picaresque life hovering at the blurriest, farthest reaches of the human shore.”—Chris Lehman, The Washington Post

“What’s memorable—even extraordinary—about this book are Flanagan’s aphoristic talent, his imagination and his uncanny ability to channel the Rabelaisian voices of the great picaresque writers—Fielding, Sterne, Smollet. . . . [Flanagan] remains unique, one of the novel’s most ambitious talents, one whose every book . . . commands our attention.”—Caroline Fraser, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Remarkable. . . . A meditation on colonialism—indeed, on history itself. . . . A serene, chilling vision of human life as comparable to the life of fish, ‘swimming in vast coldness, alone.’“—The New Yorker

“A vivid sea tale, a resonant story of conquest, a hallucinatory record of the bizarre, and perhaps something like a sea anemone—luridly colored and transfixingly strange.”—Entertainment Weekly

“[A] novel of ingenious invention and lavish scope. . . . For all that Flanagan questions everything from the truth of recorded history to the upshot of the French Enlightenment, he affirms the wonder of fiction. And life.”—Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News

“One part Rabelais, one part García Marquez, one part Ned Kelly. . . . Flanagan has terrific narrative energy.”—James Campbell, New York Times Book Review

“Flanagan’s vivid descriptions make for a memorable, if challenging, read. It’s a celebration of fevered imagination. . . . The words triumph in Gould’s Book of Fish.”—Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today

“Richard Flanagan’s remarkable new novel, Gould’s Book of Fish, is a brilliantly rendered work of the imagination that investigates the complex relationships among art, ordinary human life and the natural world with great intelligence and unquestionable panache. . . . The book is full of wild hilarity, heartbreaking cruelty and suffering, and finally love, both selfless and profane. . . . A work of significant genius.”—E. William Smethurst Jr., Chicago Tribune

“A rollicking, picaresque tale and ambitious colonial revision. . . . A captivating version of Tasmania, a tale of ugliness, love, brutality and humor, through a found text, manipulated history and fish. The fish provide enough reason to pick up the novel; the insights into Tasmania and the pleasures of Gould’s narration make one read on.”—Benjamin Austen, Philadelphia Inquirer

“Fantastic . . . it commands full attention . . . Flanagan climbs right into Gould’s skin to tell a darkly funny and brilliantly sad story about words, art, colonialism and the nature of mankind. . . . The novel goes beyond nature to talk about the European plunder of native lands and culture as well, addressing these things with heartfelt sorrow and, at times, high humor.”—Karen Sandstrom, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

“The slipperiest, most outrageous novel of the year. . . . Flanagan’s previous novel, Death of a River Guide, was a gorgeous, mystical history of Tasmania that transpires during the four minutes it takes its narrator to drown. Gould’s Book of Fish is just as wet, but it swims in deeper waters. It may not win him a larger audience, but it will earn him a more passionate one.”—Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor

“[Flanagan’s] crowning achievement so far. . . . Gould’s Book of Fish is a book of marvels, beautifully written and appropriately beautifully produced, so that the physical artifact actually strengthens and reinforces the tale. Flanagan’s tale is a riotous one, a dazzling combination of loveliness and grotesquerie, fancy and fact. It’s Tasmanian postmodern magic-realism.”—Corey Mesler, Memphis Commercial Appeal

“Audacious, labyrinthine and gratifying. . . . Gould’s Book of Fish recalls Joyce with its free-fall word fervor and use of language, and suggests the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez. More constant refrains, though, call to mind . . . Ovid [and] Joseph Conrad.”—Gordon Hauptfleish, San Diego Union-Tribune

“A work of pure brilliance. . . . Gould’s Book of Fish is a literary landmark.”—Deloris Tarzan Ament, Seattle Times

“Gould’s Book of Fish reads like an unwanted relation of Tom Jones, set where the land was wild and its immigrants wilder.”—Bruce Barcott, Outside

“A daring and inventive new work. . . . Combining the linguistic trickery of Nabokov with Dickensian characterizations, mixing genres and moods, Richard Flanagan has created a magical amalgam, a self-conscious recasting of 19th-century storytelling that is a commentary on the nature of history, of narrative, of creation itself. . . . A rare creature. . . . Classify it as a masterpiece.”—Julie Hale, Nashville Scene

“A grand meditation on art, science, brutality, and awe—one that careens through a magical, surreal kaleidoscope of fantastical happenings. By turns tragic, comedic, and exuberant, [Gould’s Book of Fish] plumbs the depths of the horrific and soars to the sublime in its quest to understand the ‘inexplicable wonder of a universe only limited by one’s own imagining of it.’”—Donna Marchetti, Islands Magazine

“Flanagan has written a Tasmanian version of Rimbaud’s Season in Hell, a mesmerizing portrait of human abjection—and sometimes elation—set in a 19th-century Down Under penal colony. . . . Carefully crafted and allusive, this blazing portrait of Australia’s colonial past will surely spread Flanagan’s reputation among American readers.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Flanagan may very well become Tasmania’s man of letters. . . . Flanagan’s darkly humorous tale is impressive in its ability to cross seamlessly the borders between the realistic and fantastic and carries a wonderful sense of drama and satisfying closure.”—Library Journal

“Ambitious. . . . The author’s fascination with the colorful, violent history of his native land and the resilience of the hard, passionate people who live on its barren soil is evident in a book whose bizarre characters are often as ragged and dangerous as the terrain itself.”—Kevin Greenberg, Book

“The book’s most insistent themes—the horrors of 19^th-century Van Diemen’s Land and their ironic application as a funhouse mirror for contemporary society—are hammered brutally home. . . . There are echoes of Joyce, Marx, Sartre and Kafka, as well as of several 18^th-century writers. . . . Magical-realist colonial-protest novel, Borgesian found-manuscript tale, anti-Enlightenment Foucauldian fable, an Oulipo-style fiction built around Gould’s paintings as Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies is built around the Tarot deck; shaggy dog story, parody, satire on modern Tasmania—the list could go on. Gould’s Book of Fish is an ambitious book. . . . Flanagan somehow makes it work on the page—largely through the mighty voice he has devised for Gould.”—Christopher Tayler, London Review of Books (UK)

“A phosphorescing talisman with a dual capacity to enchant and unhinge . . . Ultimately, Flanagan’s vision concerns neither art nor fish. It concerns the power of words to make worlds, and the impotence of actions to destroy them. Is it a masterpiece? Halfway through my second read, I know so.”—Good Reading (Sydney)

“A Tasmanian version of Ovid’s Metamorphosis . . . An exuberant, splendidly written, hugely ambitious work . . . It is a great story, finely told, a consummate use of fiction to carry, without fuss or apparent effort, some of the darkest truths or corruptions of our history.”—Australian Book Review (Melbourne)

“An exotic thing, unlike any book previously published in Australia, or perhaps the world . . . Flanagan has written a demented Tasmanian fable, like a wild dream that overlaps the nightmare of penal brutality with meditations on art and love, tourism and politics, casinos and bush-rangers and bonfires and breasts and fish.”—The Age (Melbourne)

“To describe Gould’s Book of Fish as the tale of a convict in Van Diemen’s Land who paints fish is about as accurate as saying Moby-Dick is a story about a whale. Billy Gould is as saintly as Billy Budd and as cravenly split as any of Dostoyevsky’s characters. Billy is Everyman and his tale, from his conception in a casual coupling by two nameless people, his childhood in a poorhouse, his years as a London street villain, and a convict in the harshest place on earth, is an affirmation of life rather than a lament for it.”—The Weekend Australian

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

1. While researching the origins of his copy of William Buelow Gould’s Book of Fish, Sid Hammet, the narrator for the first section, is astonished to discover another copy of the book, exact in every detail, save for the absence of Gould’s writing. “One book spoke with the authority of words and the other with the authority of silence, and it was impossible to tell which was more mysterious” [p. 23]. Is it possible that both versions of the book are genuine? What is Flanagan saying about the nature of language and art, about the authority of words versus the authority of silence?

2. Gould’s Book of Fish is very much about words, and language in the novel is a playful and highly flexible medium. Both Hammet and Gould coin terms like deadflog [p.11], mollynogging [p.159], and odourphilic (a mixed construction of Latin and Greek) [p.211]. Billy Gould and Twopenny Sal trade favorite words, Moinee and Cobber [p. 158]. Billy has special phrases for the sexual act, derived from his past adventures and his development as an artist. He even refers to the paintings he does for Pobjoy as convict Constables. In what ways is this use of language specially suited to the novel? What effects does Flanagan achieve by using language in such a way? How does it create a clearer sense of both Billy and the characters around him?

3. How would you describe Flanagan’s prose style? How do sentence structure, simile, word-choice, repetition, emphasis, etc., in the sentence below work together to give Flanagan’s style its distinctive sound and flavor? “But as I dragged my sled of a thwarted memory through snow, through driving sleet, up yet one more gully or over yet another button grass plain, across several mountain ranges & throughout as many swollen rivers, never in my most despairing of moments, in my greatest of physical agonies, would I ever, ever countenance the thought that I would not find Brady, because Brady, when I found him, would understand it all” [p. 314].

4. In what ways is Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish an unconventional narrative? How is it different from most contemporary fiction? How do such narrative elements as the back-and-forth time structure, shifting points of view, and direct address to the reader affect the way we read the book?

5. Billy Gould comes to identify the characters he meets along his journey with privately humorous, even satirical, names. What names does he apply to the prison doctor, Lempriere? What is it about Lempriere that fascinates Billy? What is Billy’s attitude toward him, and how does it develop over the course of the story? What does Lempriere—and Billy’s experience with him—reveal about Billy’s attitudes toward three of the novel’s main themes: history, science, and art? How do Lempriere’s ambitions mirror or differ from Billy’s? How do Lempriere’s ambitions reflect the period in which the story is set?

6. How does Billy’s start in life as a bastard contribute to his view of society—a society to which he is for the most part an outsider? How and why is he introduced to certain circles and to extraordinary, famous and not-so-famous, individuals? How does Billy acquire his name? How does his naming relate to the development of his personal philosophy and his strategy for survival?

7. How and why does Billy learn to paint? What passages most clearly reveal his ideas about the nature and purpose of his art? How do his methods and attitudes toward painting differ from those of the other artists he meets along the way, including Jean-Babeuf Audobon, the artisans from England, and Sid Hammet?

8. In a surreal moment, “on the evening of my seventh day as the Surgeon’s servant,” Billy begins to paint “a crude caricature of the Surgeon naked” [p. 136]. How does this scene affect Billy’s attitude toward his work? What does it suggest about his burgeoning philosophy of people and fish? Is that philosophy cynical, optimistic? How would you describe his outlook? Where else in the book does he express his philosophy?

9. In the chapter titled “The Stargazer,” Billy gets closer to understanding the way in which the penal colony works. In the process, he comes closer to the Commandant—and is charged with the duty of painting the stargazer fish at the same time. After his first attempt he writes, “In every way I knew I had failed” [p. 172]. Why does he feel he has failed? What is the significance of their wanting “a New God,” and getting a fish instead? How does the Commandant react to the painting? What does this episode suggest about Billy’s attitude toward success, failure, and ambition?

10. Throughout the book, Flanagan makes reference to historical figures. For example the bush ranger Matthew Brady bears similarities to the Australian folk hero Ned Kelly. Gould’s Book of Fish itself is an historical document around which Flanagan creates a novel. What are some other examples of characters who resemble historical figures? What is Flanagan saying about the nature of history? Do you think history is written without bias?

11. Describe the progress of the Commandant’s illness and madness, both in terms of his symptoms and the effects which his ill-health has upon others. How do his dreams and nightmares, and his increasingly grandiose plans and irrational passions, reflect Billy’s observations and disillusionment with the Enlightenment? How do the goals of the Enlightenment find their ultimate perversion in the Commandant, Lempriere, Audubon, and others?

12. The relationship between books and the world, or imagination and reality, plays an important role in the novel’s climax, as Billy sets off on his final adventure. Why is Billy’s discovery of Jorgen Jorgensen’s “conceit of an alternative world” so important? [p. 284]. Why does Billy feel, after reading the Dane’s account of the colony, that “the world no longer existed to become a book. A book now existed with the obscene goal of becoming the world” [p. 291]? In what ways is the act of reading important in the novel? How do books affect Billy’s understanding of the world and even of God? How and where does he learn to read? Does he have faith in books, or is he entirely cynical and disillusioned about learning?

13. Flanagan achieves a near-omniscient point of view, even while Billy is narrating the entire story in first person. For instance, he relates dying Capois Death’s final thoughts, from the beginning of Capois Death’s life to his last breath (albeit in reverse)—how is Flanagan able to justify this when Billy clearly could not know what Capois Death was thinking? How do such narrative leaps contribute to the novel’s originality? Does it prepare you for the action described in the book’s climax and ending? Can you think of other books, movies, or plays that employ similarly daring narrative techniques?

14. Why does Billy offer as a prayer the letters of the alphabet? Why does he describe the prayer as “a wondrous ark that confession & I really did put everything I knew in it so they might live . . .” [p. 346]? In what sense does the alphabet contain everything, like an ark? Why does he say that “it did no good whatsoever—what prayer ever did?”

15. Why, after discovering Brady’s writing, learning of Brady’s fate, and closing Brady’s book, does Billy ready himself to die, “exhausted beyond measure, all hope finally extinguished” [p. 351]? How does Brady’s experience related in his book convince Billy that “To love is not safe,” and call to Billy’s mind this diagram that illustrates both Brady’s and Billy’s predicament: “Whole circle, black man. Circle bisected, white man” [p. 350]?

16. Why in the chapter titled “The Silver Dory” is Billy “relieved” when he is returned to the penal colony and sees “the miserable magnificence of the Commandant’s Nova Venezia”? Why does his heart swell “with gratitude toward Musha Pug” [p. 357] for bringing him back?

17. Were you prepared for the final metamorphosis in Gould’s Book of Fish? In what manner had Flanagan prepared you, both metaphorically and literally, for such a bizarre and apparently mystical change? How does this transformation ultimately express Billy’s world and the seemingly inverted logic of his oppressors and indeed of the other prisoners and victims around him?

18. What do you make of the Afterword? Did the revelation of Billy Gould’s aliases surprise you? How does this revelation affect your reading of the book?

19. After the success of Gould’s Book of Fish in his native Australia, Richard Flanagan described his motivations for writing his novel. Having read a statement made by Microsoft billionaire-chairman Bill Gates to the Royal Spanish Academy calling for “an end to paper” and the shunning of books in favor of “multimedia” entertainment, Flanagan said, “I wanted to prove Bill Gates and his leprous ilk wrong…. I wanted to show the cant of technology up for the thin lie that it is . . . [Books] are one of the last avenues where the individual can speak without the dictates of power or money.” Flanagan added that because of this freedom, “books are going to be more powerful and more important in this strange century.” Do you agree with Flanagan’s statements? In what ways does his own book support his argument?

For Further Reading:
Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett; The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy; The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon; Tristram Shandy by Laurence Stern; A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson.

Interview with Richard Flanagan, author of GOULD”S BOOK OF FISH
Conducted by Jamie Kornegay, of Square Books, Oxford, MS

Jamie Kornegay: First, how did you come across William Gould? Is he a popular historical figure in Tasmania? What about him made you want to devote a novel to him?

Richard Flanagan: This novel begins many years ago when I was shown an exquisite book of which I had never heard, a volume of twenty-six watercolor paintings of fish, made by the convict forger William Buelow Gould in 1828, while serving time at the notorious penal colony of Sarah Island, the Devil’s Island of the British Empire. He had been ordered to paint the fish there for the settlement’s surgeon, a natural-history collector.

Gould’s fish are at once beautiful scientific paintings, with oddly human faces, as though the painter has smuggled something of the cruel world around him into those images. I thought how wonderful it would be to write a novel, each chapter of which began with one of these fish, and which, in telling the story about how the fish was painted, reveals the true subject of the painting—an escapee, a flagellator or his victim on the triangle. In that moment, as my eyes fell into those eyes of fish painted centuries before, the idea of this novel was born.

JK: In the book, there is mention of two different texts—one, a book of Gould’s fish illustrations; the other, obviously your fictional text in question, a book containing both his illustrations and his journal. Has any of his writing been published? How much of Gould’s life that you’ve depicted is real and how much is imagined?

RF: William Buelow Gould is an obscure figure even here in Tasmania, though there is now a growing interest in him and what his rude paintings tell of that dark, mad, strange world of Van Diemen’s Land, and by implication of tyrannies everywhere. Gould died a drunk and destitute, leaving only his paintings and larrikin tales told by others. There are no records of him ever having written anything.

My novel takes only the barest facts of Gould’s life—his name, his dissolute character, his painting of the book of fish—and invents all else. All I did was to try to rebuild the feeling that had lain dormant in those fish eyes for centuries. The novel is written against the grain of historical novels, and is, if anything, an anti-historical novel in its determination to try and apprehend the past and its relationship to the present, to us, in a different way.

JK: From our first introduction to Gould, when his miraculous book begins on page 41, he is often a comical figure. What about Gould struck you as funny?

RF: Billy Gould made me laugh at a time in my life when I needed it. Much about his world strikes Gould as funny, because, I suspect, humor is the last and perhaps greatest defense human dignity has. And it was this, the way he explained not only his world, but mine, through his black humor—what we here call taking the piss, often out of himself, because there is no other target available—that I so loved about him. But he never struck me as funny, rather as deeply human, one for whom humor was as necessary as the soul.

Or perhaps for whom humor is the soul.

JK: I would be interested to know how you characterize the relationship between Gould and his fish. Is there a broader correlation at work?

RF: I don’t characterize Gould’s relationship with the fish. Perhaps it is—as he himself suspects—love. I have no idea if there are broader correlations at work, though some readers may have a hunch there is. But I wouldn’t know. Chekhov wrote how it is not the writer’s job to judge his characters. That, he says, is the role of God, while a writer can only describe what a character does and says.

JK: The Commandant is quite a dynamic character. His notions of nationality are frightening and his methods of re-creating Europe on Sarah Island colony are barbarous. What drives this character’s obsession and what inspired you to create him?

RF: I was always taken with the immense pathos of tyrants. My own island has had a procession of strong arm premiers (the equivalent of your governors) who while not dictators, display all the same madness. Their invention of themselves and their destinies has always struck me as not so removed from the work of a novelist in its impetus, if not in its consequences.

The Commandant has all sorts of models: from Gogol’s mother in Russia reading the letters written by her son from Italy leading her to believe her wonderful child is inventing all the wonders of modern Europe, to Oedipus Rex, to a certain notorious Australian politician.

But his obsession with re-creating Europe is the colonial project that Australia seems lately to have returned to; a shame of its own experience, a sense all art from elsewhere is inevitably better and truer than art made by ourselves of our own world. Someone said to me he is the World Bank, determined to replace what is unique in one place with what is ubiquitous everywhere. But for me, he was a man I ended up feeling greatly for; and perhaps this was because his melancholy was not dissimilar to that of a novelist, one who creates a false world only to discover a life’s work is but ash and vanity.

JK: Your description of the brutality of the penal colony—the imaginative torture devices, the treatment of prisoners, the living conditions—makes the skin crawl. How did you create this world? Is it based on research?

RF: I did no research, though I suppose I grew up imbibing the history of here, and such familiarity meant that, in the way of horror, little in the book is invented, though it is assembled in a manner fictional rather than historical.

But in the end the horror is not of that nineteenth-century penal colony but of contemporary life itself. The book has been described as a parable for our times. Though I am ever more unsure as to what the book is, this idea seems closer to its truth than most.

JK: Having begun as a penal colony, Tasmania must still harbor a fair bit of convict lore. Do these stories seep down through generations?

RF: Yes and no. The oddity of the island is that it is both characterized by a very powerful memory and an equally powerful repression of memory. Freedom exists only in the space of memory, yet man survives by his ability to forget. Both impulses have very deep and necessary bases in human souls, and both find strong and strange expression here.

To give the example of my own family: we were descended on almost all sides from Irish convicts transported during the Great Famine to Van Diemen’s Land. And yet, until on her death bed when my aged grandmother confided to me that her grandfather, of whom she had strong memories, was a convict, we had no inkling of any of this.

He was, it transpired, a convicted Whiteboy.

Eric Hobsbawm in his The Age of Revolution writes—‘In all of Western Europe (leaving aside the Iberian peninsula) only Ireland contained a large and endemic movement of agrarian revolutionaries, organized in secret and widespread terrorist societies such as the Ribbonmen and the Whiteboys.’

Terry Eagleton in Heathcliff & the Great Hunger more poetically observes of the Whiteboys and other less well known secret societies, that they, ‘Sought to operate a kind of primitive workers control in the countryside, aiming to regulate land, wages, prices, rents, tithes, and dues by violence and intimidation. ‘Midnight legislators,’ as one commentator of 1815 aptly described them, they constructed an alternative legal, political, and military network of their own, sometimes of a rough-and-ready democratic kind, as a countervailing force to the official political system. With their carnivalesque iconography—baroque oaths, female clothing, exotic pseudonyms, mythical eaders and esoteric initiation ceremonies—these primitive rebels merged downwards into an illegal underworld of tories (bandits), rapparees, smugglers, poteen brewers and faction fighters, and shaded upwards into the daylight world of formal political activity.’
It all sounded much like my family, and indeed it was, and once we began trawling the archives we began to find Irish convicts everywhere on the family tree—some like my great-great grandfather Thomas Flanagan sent for stealing eight pounds of cornmeal at the height of the Famine—but until that moment of my dying grandmother’s confession, the terrible shame of it all had meant we knew none of it.

JK: The barrel of floating black heads is a powerful, recurring image. Can you explain the significance of that?

RF: Stories of grave robbing and skull stealing are well known here. The trade was both lucrative in terms of money and status, and were a useful way of acquiring entrée into English intellectual circles. And all of this, all this grave robbing and skull stealing and skin and hair poaching, was done in the name of European science and English civilization.

Yet the colonial collectors were ill-used themselves; forming part of an assembly line of imperial thought, in which they were essential but little regarded. They were allowing the new world in which they found themselves to be defined by the old in the motley of all its oppressions, some old, many shockingly new. Tasmanian black heads and skulls were used by European scientists to back up claims of racial degeneracy and hierarchy. They are not unimportant in the history of thought that leads to the Final Solution.

A different, less odious example is that of Sir Joseph Hooker’s Flora Tasmaniae, published a few months after Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Hooker was a much more eminent figure than the little known Darwin, and his book on Tasmanian plants was seen as a major work. In his introduction Hooker robustly defended Darwin’s theory of evolution, using the flora of Tasmania as his proof, and it was his arguments that turned the tide in favor of Darwin and his ideas. This is remembered; the work of Hooker’s Tasmanian collectors who over the years collected, preserved, and had sent to him all their plants and flowers forgotten.

I remember when I was a student at Oxford being routinely derided for coming from a country that was said to have no civilization, yet just round the corner in Oxford’s celebrated Pitt Rivers Museum was the most comprehensive collection of stolen body parts assembled since antiquity, and this barbarity was defended as knowledge and enlightenment. This was frankly puzzling.

JK: A figure of hope for Gould during his imprisonment is Matt Brady, the bushranger, who it is believed will come and liberate the prisoners. Is Brady a real historical figure, and who were the bushrangers?

RF: Bushrangers were a Tasmanian invention, convicts who escaped the tyranny of the British gulag and formed gangs, roaming and robbing the Van Diemonian countryside. For a time they threatened the very fabric of colonial society. Some were simply cruel and violent, but others became folk heroes in their challenging of the existing social order.
Matt Brady was the most loved and the most feared, and he had vowed to liberate the felons of Sarah Island, but never made good on his promise, perhaps defeated by the sheer difficulty of the wilderness he had to traverse to achieve such a feat. Still, his example and that of others were to inspire later generations of mainland bushrangers as figures representing larger political and social struggles, most famously Ned Kelly, the son of a Van Diemonian convict. Parts of Ned Kelly’s famous Jerilderee Letter—the language of which Peter Carey has claimed as the inspiration of his novel of Kelly—are paraphrases of Tasmanian convict ballads of revolt.

JK: Are there other prominent Tasmanian writers?

RF: No, not really. It had a very colonial literary culture. There were lots of poets who’d come over here and have sublime thoughts in what they thought was the beautiful landscape, but they never wanted to write about the people who they saw, in your parlance, the rednecks. Your experience here, that wasn’t a fitting subject for real literature, and what people wrote here looked like English or American models in an obvious, necrophilic sort of way. Their writings were death masks of literary fashion, long since dead elsewhere in the world, and yet all the time there was this huge subconscious well of experience that no one wished to draw upon.

JK: Where do you stand on the age-old question: which is more reliable, history or fiction?

RF: I was trained as a historian, and it struck me on returning to Tasmania from Oxford how, for all its undoubted splendors, history was a very European and nineteenth century way of thinking; a railway line of thought, stopping at all forms of human progress on the way. But in Tasmania, this seemed an inadequate way of representing our lives there, our dreams and nightmares and jokes, of understanding that world, of understanding time, which came to me to seem the very essence of the consciousness of life, and which I suspected was perhaps better understood as circular rather than linear. For this was the way it had always been explained to me in the stories I had heard, great circular tales that ended where they began, that digressed endlessly, whose meaning remained with you like a seed from a pharaoh’s tomb, something that one day would grow into a wondrous tree bearing all manner of exotic fruit. It was the way Aborigines had once understood their cosmos and lived their understanding: camping in circles in circular or semicircular shelters; inscribing circles on their flesh and in stone; and it was the way I felt increasingly drawn to try and write.

But as for your question, I have no idea what is more reliable, only the suspicion that for us both are necessary.

JK: The Australian press compared you to an impressive and diverse slate of authors. Which authors—or other muses—do you credit for inspiring your literary vision?

RF: Comparisons are ever a form of incomprehension.

But as to what authors have moved me—well, whenever I am asked this question my mind goes blank for there are so many writers, but an incomplete list would include Cortazar for those beautiful sentences. Borges for joy in reading. Carver for the capture of lives in a heartbeat. Faulkner for not knowing what he was doing and not caring. Marquez for rejoining the novel’s radical purpose with a mass audience. Can I stop yet? Sherwood Anderson for making Hemingway possible, and Hemingway for being impossible, as well as his sentences. Gogol for his passionate love of the mad and the bad. Grass for writing a perfect novel. Sterne for writing an imperfect novel. Rabelais for his abandonment of style and embrace of story. Flaubert for still thinking novels matter. Hrabal for encompassing infinity in 120 pages and thinking novels still ought be novel. Chekhov, whose incomparable technique I still cannot fathom. Machado de Assis, whose Epitah of a Small Winner is the Americas’ Candide, and Voltaire, whose Candide is Candide, funny and wise. Walt Whitman, from whom I learnt that your words are nothing, the drift of them everything. Twain for Huckleberry Finn, revolutionary writing. Alastair MacLeod, for taking me to another world that yet seemed mine. Seamus Heaney for precision. Pablo Neruda for making words drip juice. Rumi for seeking to be beyond words. Camus who first alerted me at twelve to all that novels might be and Hardy, in whose work every sentence is a beam bearing much greater weights than its own meaning, Jaroslav Hasek for one of the maddest, greatest books and Kadare for a life of books and Ivo Andric for trying to bridge not just cultures, but forms, ideas. Jimmy Baldwin from whom I learnt how to build a novel. Nelson Algren. Kazantzakis. Primo Levi. Boll. Dostoevsky. And Cervantes, with whom the modern novel begins and I must end what can never be ended.

JK: Was there one book, as Gould’s Book was for Sid Hammet, that awoke the artist in you?

RF: I suspect not one, but being a lapsed Catholic, a trinity: Kafka’s The Trial, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud A Solitude.

JK: You have expressed a fondness for the work of William Faulkner, and his famous quote from As I Lay Dying sets the tone for your novel. Did his mislaid plan to print The Sound and the Fury in different colored inks inspire your decision to do the same?

RF: There are many writers I have loved, but no other has been quite the revelation Faulkner was, when I got around to reading him in my late twenties. In Australia he is not the literary superstar he is in the USA. His reputation here is that of the relentless obscurity accorded yet one more modern master, an abyss of seeming irrelevance, and so I came to him in a good way: quietly, expecting little. I was, as you may guess, shocked, overwhelmed, delighted, and astonished by the bravery and daring of his writing.

And for someone who came from a society as benighted as Tasmania, where the trajectory of any who wished to write was to leave and forever after deny or dam their origins, the example of a writer who stayed where he was born, constantly engaging in a profoundly radical way with a world for which there was no literary template was infinitely exciting.

And so yes, you are right that Faulkner’s plan to print The Sound and the Fury in different colored inks in part inspired me to do the same. Faulkner was constantly trying to explode books open. But color, the idea of books as visceral and sensual as well as cerebral, is a much older idea. From the Book of Kells to Sufi illuminated manuscripts, to Blake’s beautiful limited editions (twelve copies I think) of Songs of Innocence and Experience, books were understood to embody something more than mere text, and the use of color was very much part of this. This idea was lost to us with the advent of the steam press, which though it made mass literacy possible and made the novel a major folk art form, robbed writers of some of the magic previously inherent and achievable in books. Only now and only just are price and technology such that a book like the Book of Fish becomes possible. Even so, getting the idea of the book past publishers, designers and printers was no easy matter, for all thought it ludicrous and doomed to failure.

Against their own better judgment, my Australian publishers backed me in this madness. Because I wanted the novel not to be some special novelty costing an outrageous sum, the book had to be published at a price that was within the range of what novels normally retail for. Before I wrote a word I set to work with a designer and a publishing production supervisor to come up with design specs that were commercially feasible, and I then wrote the novel to these specs, seeking to use color as one more creative element, that might be deployed to advance story and character, in the way I had learnt was possible from film directing.

JK: What is your opinion of the modern American novel?

RF: Do you wish me lynched?

It may be good or it may be bad; I can only reply with honesty that what I have read of it—which is but the smallest fraction—is for me very largely uninteresting. I find it often well crafted, well conceived and well written; its intolerable nature arises for me out of it seeming to be about so little. Unlike Whitman, it does seem to be contained between its boots and hat.

There are a handful of exceptions: interestingly they are for me your writers away from the big centers, particularly those in the south, who still seek to write against the grain. Lamentably, in Australia we are exposed not to them but to the literary fashion prevailing in NYC.

JK: Have you considered making a film of Gould’s Book of Fish, as you did for The Sound of One Hand Clapping?

RF: I wrote the book with the churlish ambition of being unfilmable. I wearied of being told over and over that the measure of a book’s worth was the box office on its film version. I wanted to write a book that could only exist as a book, that took advantage of all that was unique to the form to show that books may still compass infinity, that within every novel remained implicit the universe.

"Triumphantly extravagant fiction . . . Fascinating work, and very much Flanagan's best yet." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A gorgeously written novel . . . Readers will be entranced."—Booklist (starred review)

Australian writer Richard Flanagan is the author of the internationally acclaimed novels Death of a River Guide and The Sound of One Hand Clapping. Sure to be one of the most exciting literary events this year, GOULD'S BOOK OF FISH (Grove Press; $27.50, cloth; pages; ISBN: 0-8021-1711-2; April 19, 2002) is Flanagan's most remarkable work yet—unique in conception and execution, it is a marvelous historical epic of Nineteenth-century Australia, a world of convicts and colonists, thieves and catamites, whose bloody history is recorded in a very unusual taxonomy of fish.

Once upon a time, when the earth was still young, before all 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 Sarah Island penal colony of Van Diemen's Land—now Tasmania. A talented phony and art forger, Gould was enlisted by the prison doctor Lempriere to get him into the Royal Society by painting 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. Foolish Billy Gould, invader of Australia, thief, liar, and murderer, lived to bear witness to horror and ridicule, and to miracles.

Destined to become a collector's item, the USA's limited first edition of GOULD'S BOOK OF FISH will be printed as it was originally conceived, complete with four-color plates of William Gould's fish at the beginning of each chapter. The book's text will be printed in six colors: red, blue, green, black, brown, and purple. Each color is intrinsic to the narrative. For example, in one chapter Billy is forced to use his own blood as ink, in another the ground-up purple spikes of a sea urchin, and in another green laudanum. The red ink chapter reflects Billy's murderous frame of mind; the purple ink chapter recounts the tale of a failed emperor and is written in "purple" prose, and the green ink laudanum-soaked chapter tells of hallucination and jealously.

GOULD'S BOOK OF FISH is a darkly funny, original book about love—between a white convict and a black woman, the love of books and how such love can be conveyed to others.

International Praise for Gould's Book of Fish:

"Open it, plunge in and begin a swim through marvelous waters. This is fiction bursting from a fecund imagination colored by Rabelais, Smollett, Fielding, Sterne, Melville, Hemingway, and Dostoyevsky. All these grand voices swim along just under the surface, but it's Flanagan's exuberant voice that hits the air. . . . The book . . . alerts your comic sense as does Rabelais, and reverberates in your imagination with the force of Wuthering Heights." —The Weekend Australian (Sydney)

"A phosphorescing talisman with a dual capacity to enchant and unhinge . . . Ultimately, Flanagan's vision concerns neither art nor fish. It concerns the power of words to make worlds, and the impotence of actions to destroy them. Is it a masterpiece? Halfway through my second read, I know so." —Good Reading (Sydney)

"A Tasmanian version of Ovid's Metamorphoses . . . An exuberant, splendidly written, hugely ambitious work . . . It is a great story, finely told, a consummate use of fiction to carry, without fuss or apparent effort, some of the darkest truths or corruptions of our history." —Australian Book Review (Melbourne)

"An exotic thing, unlike any book previously published in Australia, or perhaps the world . . . Flanagan has written a demented Tasmanian fable, like a wild dream that overlaps the nightmare of penal brutality with meditations on art and love, tourism and politics, casinos and bush-rangers and bonfires and breasts and fish." —The Age (Melbourne)

GOULD'S BOOK OF FISH
Richard Flanagan
Grove Press; $27.50, cloth; 416 pages
ISBN: 0-8021-1711-2
Publication Date: April 19, 2002

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	The Sound of One Hand Clapping by Richard Flanagan A sweeping novel of world war, migration, and the search for new beginnings in a new land, The Sound of One Hand Clapping was both critically acclaimed and a best-seller in Australia. It was 1954, in a construction camp for a hydroelectric dam in the remote Tasmanian highlands, where Bojan Buloh had brought his family to start a new life away from Slovenia, the privations of war, and refugee settlements. One night, Bojan's wife walked off into a blizzard, never to return—leaving Bojan to drink too much to quiet his ghosts, and to care for his three-year-old daughter Sonja alone. Thirty-five years later, Sonja returns to Tasmania and a father haunted by memories of the European war and other, more recent horrors. As the shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present, Sonja's empty life and her father's living death are to change forever. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is about the barbarism of an old world left behind, about the harshness of a new country, and the destiny of those in a land beyond hope who seek to redeem themselves through love. "Masterful . . . Combining acuity with lyricism, Flanagan chronicles the insidious effects of war . . . [and] how the fragmented can be made whole again."—San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
	Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan Following his American debut with The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Richard Flanagan gives us an extraordinary novel as sprawling and compelling as the land and people it describes. Beneath a waterfall on a remote Tasmanian river, Aljaz Cosini is drowning. Beset by visions, he relives not just his own life but that of his family and forebears. He sees his father, Harry, burying his own father, Boy. He sees Boy himself as a young man, and his Auntie Ellie, chased by a cow she believes is a Werowa spirit. In the waters that rush over him Aljaz finds a world where his story connects to family stories that are Aboriginal, Celtic, Italian, English, Chinese, and East European—what he ultimately discovers in the flood of the past is the soul history of his country. “Death of a River Guide makes good on a truly soaring ambition and flirts with literary greatness. . . . An indelible vision of how surely the history of a land plays its part in shaping the interior landscape of the human beings who occupy it.”—The Chicago Tribune
	Gould's Book of Fish A Novel in Twelve Fish by Richard Flanagan A Book Sense 76 Selection Flanagan’s novel is an astonishing epic of nineteenth-century Australia, a world of convicts and colonists, thieves and catamites. William Buelow Gould, sentenced to life in a penal colony on Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), is ordered by the doctor to create an illustrated taxonomy of the country’s exotic sea creatures. Gould’s book was lost and re-created, destroyed and hidden, and finally resurfaced in the present day, littered with scrawls recording Gould’s unutterably strange life—part freewheeling picaresque, part Gothic horror—and that of his country as a penal colony, settlement, and magical frontier populated by generals, visionaries, and madmen. Gould’s Book of Fish is a tour de force that delves into history, science, and artistic creation. “Gorgeously written. . . . [A] richly detailed work that calls attention to a major new talent.”—Booklist (starred review). “Triumphantly extravagant fiction.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)