“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 reader begins a rollicking, funny, filthy, dark and disturbing trip that impresses, entertains, confounds, challenges and irritates. Best of all, he makes one think.

Is this not the point of art?

Significant works of art challenge us, and to this end, this is not an easy book to read. Rich with allusions to just about every philosopher and author imaginable, with Voltaire and Hegel ever-present. Throw in ahistorical references to Marx, Satre, Joyce, Faulker and innumerable others that appear and disappear in the blink of an eye. At first, I found it irritating, but once I relaxed into the rollicking pace, I started to enjoy myself.

As a born and bred (and not at all proud) Tasmanian, I may have read this quite differently to others. I am more cynical, critical and sensitive to inaccuracies. I know the pubs in which Flanagan takes us. I am a keen snorkeler and bushwalker, so I see the fish and the landscape that dominate the text every day. I am fascinated, repelled and scornful of history and have explored it through every lens you can find.

My verdict? Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish is the real deal. It gets Tasmania in a way that others do not. In its absurdities, inanities, and abnormalities. In its lies upon delusions upon fantasies and imagined sense of itself, I could not agree more wholeheartedly.

Bullshit upon bullshit upon blood and shit and piss and a whole lot of dead fish, animals and people. That's the Tasmania that I know and love tolerate!

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐