‘Gould’s Book of Fish’ by Richard Flanagan (2001)
A Novel in 12 Fish
‘Gould’s Book of Fish’ is a novel about those convicts who were transported to Tasmania (then called Van Diemen’s Land) by the British government in the early 1800’s, those in charge of the prisons, and those aborigines who lived there. Over the course of 60 years, more than 165,000 prisoners were transported to Australia.
This book has a unique arrangement where each chapter is a fish painted by convict William Buelow Gould. These fish/chapters are called ‘Kelpie’, ‘the sawtooth shark’, ‘the striped cowfish’, etc.
In the first chapter, there is a very humorous modern story about some Tasmanians preparing fake antique Shaker furniture to sell to the rich fat American tourists. After this story, I settled in for a humorous ride, little realizing where I would be taken. Many of the scenes in this novel are laugh riots, often resulting from the vicious idiocy of the overseers back in England and the flat-out insanity of the prison authorities on Van Diemen’s Land. But humor is not Flanagan’s ultimate destination in this book.
One of the early chapters is devoted to the torture devices used on the convicts. These devices are ingenious in their cruelty. The elaborate descriptions of these made-up devices show the lengths to which the prison authorities would go to inflict pain on their convicts.
In one scene in the novel, the scientists back in England want some fresh specimens of skulls of the aborigines and request them of the prison authorities on Van Diemen’s Land. The prison authorities order the convicts to get the skulls, so the convicts go out and murder and behead thirty six aborigines, ‘blackfellas’ as Gould calls them. Then the prison Commandant boils the skulls in preparation for shipping them back to England. Insufferable politically correct prig that I am, I failed to see the humor in these beheadings or the chopping off of arms and legs or the other acts of humiliation done to the aborigines that are portrayed in this novel. These acts were probably done in real life all too frequently. It’s one thing to fool rich fat American tourists by selling them fake Shaker furniture. It’s a completely different horrific thing to chop somebody’s arm or head off.
I began to feel very uneasy about this novel. This novel was not turning out to be the rollicking,
good time boisterous picaresque Australian novel it originally seemed to be. Who can laugh at the matter-of-fact beheading of aborigines for the sake of a scientific study in England? At this point I was planning to write a review pretty much berating Flanagan for his callousness.
Only at about page 300 did I find out Richard Flanagan’s true purpose with this novel. This is when Gould discovers that the prison authorities have been keeping a sanitized version of everything that has been going on in the prison. This sanitized version of events contains none of the severe torture of the prisoners and none of the beheadings, chopping off of arms, legs, and heads, or other degradations the aborigines were subjected to. In other words, the official history of the prison on Sarah Island was a complete book of lies.
So despite its appearance, ‘Gould’s Book of Fish’ is not a hilarious rollicking jaunt through Australian history. It is deadly serious about the desperate, despicable attempts by those in charge to cover up and hide what really happened. If these books of lies become a part of the culture, it is as though the past did not happen and the people who were there never existed.
Flanagan makes no concessions to the readers of this novel. Even though Gould is one of the convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land, his writing is in very long and complicated sentences. The novel is supposed to be written by Gould back in the early 1800’s and in those days sentences were longer. At that time, writers wrote longer sentences connecting two or more thoughts together with the symbol ‘ & ‘. This can be difficult for modern readers. More than a few times I became impatient with the over-written, over-stuffed sentences in this book. Also, as I’ve indicated before, I was completely fooled as to the true nature of this novel for nearly 300 pages. By framing the book as a humorous picaresque story, I think it was Flanagan’s intent to make the readers uneasy and uncomfortable with what happens, especially to the aborigines.
In preparation for writing this post, I googled Richard Flanagan on the net. He has taken some courageous stands in Tasmania.
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