Richard Flanagan
Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
Picador, $50hb, 404pp, 0 330 363 03 4

' … these days I am no longer sure what is memory and what is revelation. How faithful the story you are about to read is to the original is a bone of contention with the few people I had allowed to read the original Book of Fish … certainly, the book you will read is the same as the book I remember reading, and I have tried to be true both to the wonder of that reading and to the extraordinary world that was Gould's.'

THIS IS SID HAMMET'S cautionary introduction to the reader. Given his penchant for, or at least hapless vulnerability to, equivocation, obfuscation and obliquity, he might just as well be Sid Hamlet. Perhaps he is — identity is only one of the concepts that succumbs to subversion in this extraordinary, deceptively rollicking, yet often horrific story.

Hammet makes a dicey living in Hobart belting together fake period furniture for the tourists and 'ageing' it with libations of his own piss. One winter's morning 'that was to prove fateful but at the time merely seemed freezing', he is fossicking in a junk shop when he finds, buried beneath a stack of long out-of-date women's magazines, a weird book with a curious, intermittently luminous cover. This turns out to be William Buelow Gould's Book of Fish. Transported to Sarah Island in 1828, convict Gould, 'in the supposed interest of science', was ordered to paint all the fish caught in the island's waters. The paintings, however, are annotated heavily with Gould's own scrawled, multicoloured (because of his varied and exotic sources of 'ink') journal. Hammet, obsessed with the book, discovers that, in some odd way, it is never-ending. Every time he consults it he discovers some new section, or a scrap of paper drops from its prison within the pages to add yet more substance.

Hammet loses the Book of Fish under strange, if not occult, circumstances and sets out to remember and rewrite it — 'a book in which there is no popular interest nor academic justification nor financial reward, nothing really, save the folly of an unrequited passion'. Moreover, 'the story it purports to tell, the fishes it claims to represent, the convicts and guards and penal administrators it seeks to describe — seemed to concur with the known facts only long enough to enter with them into argument'. The book is, in the opinion of some of Hammet's circle, the 'curious product of a particularly deranged mind of long ago'.

The opening manoeuvres of the narrative — our introduction to Hammet, his discovery of the Book of Fish, his jousting with its palpable presence, then its obsessive lingering in his tortured memory — are managed in some of the most scintillating and irresistible prose in the book, which is not to suggest a later falling-away, but beginnings are important and Flanagan has all the stops out to ensure that this maverick narrative shades from the seedy realities of Hammet's Hobart existence into fairy tale — which it duly does:

Once upon a time there was a man named Sid Hammet and he discovered he was not who he thought he was … who saw reflected in the glow of a strange book of fish his story … Once upon a time terrible things happened, but it was long ago in a far-off place that everyone knows is not here or now or us …

A series of once-upon-a-times launches us into Hammet's version of the Book of Fish and seem almost inconsequential — a handy way to seduce the reader. But, in retrospect — many things in this sprawling, luscious, shocking story fall into illuminating place in retrospect — one realises that Hammet is many people and that 'terrible things', truly terrible things, did happen. From one perspective, Gould's Book of Fish is a Tasmanian version of Ovid's Metamorphosis. Everything changes yet endures in another form. There is the cynical and relatively inconsequential metamorphosis of Hammet's transformation of 'old pieces of rotting furniture' into fake antiques for monied 'fat old Americans'. Then there are the important differences between the two books of fish (yes, there are two, but you'll have to delve into that one on your own), not to mention the eerily unstable appearance of the annotated version. And there is, above all, the central, metamorphosing character of William Buelow Gould himself and the bizarre entourage of endlessly posturing, transforming characters dictating his fate.

The narrative itself is a vast metamorphosing phenomenon, racing ahead, doubling back, seeming at one moment to be fragmenting and at another to have a steely focus, an obsessive emphasis. Like Such Is Life, Gould's Book of Fish is not so much a traceable story as a series of substantial, ramified, slowly interconnecting observations. Where Tom Collins's diary entries are given coherence by emphasis on place and recurrence of characters and themes, 'Billy Gould's' wavering annotations are tied together by the silent ministry of fish, one fish loosely allotted to each stage of the story — a novel in twelve fish. And where Such Is Life is, at heart, a theory of narrative, Gould's Book of Fish is, among other things, an extended contemplation of the meaning, significance (if any) and relationship to 'real life' of Art.

But none of this explains or elaborates the last and most potent of those once-upon-a-times — a 'time when terrible things happened, but it was long ago in a far-off place that everyone knows is not here or now or us'. In a book subtly studded with literary and other potent references — to Blake, Hardy, Marx, Shakespeare and many others — it would not have been surprising to have Billy Gould murmur, 'The horror, the horror'. He doesn't, in so many words, but he is as surely embarked on a journey towards the horror as Marlow was in Heart of Darkness, and it is the same horror: the systematic destruction of a people; genocide:

I don't know … why I am to hang for two murders I never committed, yet why nobody is guilty of the tree of [Aboriginal] skulls. Nor do I know why murdering [two convict administrators] is deemed a crime, while murdering a people is at best a question & at worst a scientifick imperative.

Hammet's story of William Buelow Gould's story — in which the two become merged and, in the end, are metamorphosed into a fish — is a circuitous, distancing, horrified way of recording, examining and finally being explicit about the massacre of the Tasmanian Aborigines. And because Gould, by accident, gains entry to the penal colony's records and there discovers the monstrous revisionism of history that has erased the truth, the story is also both a cry of anguish and a shout of protest against the manipulation and laundering of history.

The sometimes wilfully digressive (or so it seems), sometimes self-indulgent narrative, does not diminish the force of these emerging central concerns because Flanagan is capable of soaring moments of sudden increased intensity, almost purple patches, where he effortlessly deepens the seriousness or widens the range of reference (the book has, incidentally, many moments of sharp contemporary satire, offered sometimes almost en passant, such as Professor Roman de Silva's judgment that the Book of Fish might 'find a place in the inglorious, if not insubstantial, history of Australian literary frauds'). A labyrinthine story, which Billy Gould presents as intrinsically out of control much of the time, does seem to escape the author's control here and there. One never knows how much an editor attempted to rein in a narrative or what suggestions were made which the author rejected, but there is room for tightening up. The conceit of the twelve fish, for example, attractive as it is, loosens progressively as the story evolves and the metamorphoses of Hammet/Buelow can be confusing towards the crowded end of the story.

Nevertheless, Gould's Book of Fish is an exuberant, splendidly written, hugely ambitious work. It is unerringly evocative of its period without resorting to the overblown 'Gadzooks, bollock me scrags' kind of dialogue beloved of the blockbuster historical romances. Above all, it is a great story, finely told, a consummate use of fiction to carry, without fuss or apparent effort, some of the darkest truths and corruptions of our history. It is a challenging read and may turn out to be one of those books that sort readers out — some passionately for; others straightforwardly against.

Well, I'm for.