“So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary—how am I to resolve them?”
Seagull on a chimney (I know, I know, it's serious), Hobart, March 2021. Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish by Richard Flanagan Where to start with this odd beast? We start with a caution that our (initial) narrator cannot be trusted. From here, we enter into his reconstruction of a text that our untrustworthy narrator warns is one of another unreliable narrator. Master Gould (sic) is most insistent in his testimony that the reader cannot trust his account. In this remarkable and peculiar novel, Flanagan explores the nature of memory, history and the very grand stories that individuals and nations console themselves. What is 'true' much depends upon who is asking and what is it they wish to hear. In this, the history of Van Diemen's Land presents exceptional fodder. More succinctly, it is a tale of a bullshitter. The narrator is a bullshitter in love with bullshitting. In that, he understands that bullshit is all that we can ever have. From here, the r...