Books
Lost on the island of forgetting. John Dugdale on a remarkable novel that has already been acclaimed in America as "the first great book of the new century"
Published 03 June 2002
Gould's Book of Fish: a novel in twelve fish
Richard Flanagan Atlantic Books, 404pp, £16.99
ISBN 1843540215
What, another imagined autobiography of a real 19th-century Australian criminal? It takes startling self-confidence to produce such a work scarcely 18 months after True History of the Kelly Gang, thereby throwing down the gauntlet to Peter Carey. Richard Flanagan's audacity is amply justified, however. His writing has the unmistakable shimmer of literary star quality throughout this, his third novel, which is arguably more ambitious and certainly more kaleidoscopically diverse than Carey's 2001 Booker winner.
Besides being set in the 1820s rather than the late-Victorian era, it differs significantly from True History in opening with a prologue introducing its ostensible author, Sid Hammet, a boozy idler in present-day Hobart. Unemployed after a scam involving fake antique furniture is busted, he discovers a copy of a book of fish paintings by the convict artist William Gould in a junk shop; but whereas the volume preserved in the state library consists only of the still lifes (which charmingly illustrate this novel), in the version he finds - or hallucinates - Gould's scribbled memoir occupies all the remaining space.
Licensed by this framing story to play fast and loose with the known details of Gould's biography (unlike Carey with Ned Kelly), Flanagan makes him a forger, sentenced in 1825 to transportation from England to Tasmania, then called Van Diemen's Land. During the voyage, he produces crude sketches for the captain, and once arrived in the penal compound of Sarah's Island ("the most dreaded place of punishment in the entire British empire") his untrained artistic talent wins him an easier regime than the other convicts.
Initially, he works as servant to the colonial surgeon Lempriere. An amateur naturalist, this grotesque, deluded figure is determined to be accepted into the Royal Society. He tasks Gould with making sketches of Antipodean fish species which he then sends off to London, unaware that the patron who assures him that membership is within his grasp is simply exploiting these discoveries to enhance his own reputation. Still more bizarre is Lt Horace, the self-appointed Commandant of the island, who turns it into a trading post that he dreams will be a "second Venice". Appointed his court artist, Gould produces heroic portraits of his patron, depicts a variety of landscapes on scenic backdrops placed along the route of the railway that the deranged Commandant builds, and decorates a grand hall with huge, painted texts of letters sent to Horace from England by his sister Anne.
These periods of comparative freedom, however, are only intermissions in years otherwise spent - when he is wrongly suspected of causing the deaths of Lempriere and the Commandant's sinister aide, Jorgen Jorgensen - either on the run in the wilderness, or awaiting execution in a "saltwater cell", where he is submerged up to his chin at high tide. It is there that he writes and paints the book Hammet will stumble on 175 years later.
What Gould comes to learn in Britain's newest colony is that everyone else is a forger or faker, too. Lempriere's pretended disinterested devotion to science masks grubby ambition. The Commandant is an escaped convict who adopted the identity of the late Lt Horace - and the letters from Horace's sister that he treats as scripture, it eventually emerges, are just as bogus as he is. Jorgensen is another impostor with a criminal past, and his apparently dry, meticulous records of the penal system are loopy fabrications.
Merging with Hammet in the closing pages, Gould portrays Australia itself as similarly concocted by Australians: "they've all been making the place up . . . as the island of forgetting, because anything is easier than remembering" - remembering its origins as a dump for Europe's human waste, founded on prison camps and genocide.
Flanagan's depiction of imperialism in operation is just as mordant and sharply imagined as Thomas Pynchon's in the African and colonial American sections of V and Gravity's Rainbow, but, also like these novels, Gould's Book of Fish shows that acrid, arresting history is far from incompatible with humour and metafictional games. Prodigal with teasing images of itself, this book is also full of echoes (such as Hammet's name, a nod to a like-sounding parallel character in Don Quixote) of writ-ers including Cervantes, Defoe, Fielding, Melville, Joyce, Borges and GarcIa Marquez - figures conscious of inaugurating, or in Joyce's word "forging", a nation's prose literature.
The biggest debt is clearly to Carey, and perhaps particularly to his early novel Illywhacker, a journey through the 20th century in the company of a conman. Yet Flanagan outdares Carey by pushing further back towards the country's dark beginnings than any of Carey's historical works; and he shows a versatility within one novel that Carey has only displayed across his oeuvre as a whole. Gould's Book of Fish is a virtuoso exercise in period pastiche, a prison diary, a caustic critique of colonialism, a raunchy Georgian picaresque romp taking in three continents, a study of insanity, a meditation on art and nature, and a witty, self-conscious postmodern construct. It makes True History of the Kelly Gang seem comparatively thin and monotonous.
This appears to be the point of an otherwise puzzling episode when Gould is on the run in the island's untamed interior, hoping to join up with rebels led by the outlaw Matt Brady. In a deserted hut, he discovers Brady's journal and expects to be transfixed, but it proves to be "utter futility". It can hardly be mere coincidence that the author of this dispiriting autobiography - its style "too artless", its method showing "no ambition" - is an earlier version of Ned Kelly.
Flanagan's slyest joke, however, mocks both his own fiction and the reader. Gould's Book of Fish is ingeniously packaged to resemble the old text of the same name that turns up in the junk shop, foxed on the jacket and with dirty spots inside. It is distressed to simulate age, in other words - just like the fake 19th-century furniture that Hammet flogs to tourists before his epiphany. Like the seahorse on the cover, this bewitching novel gazes beadily, inscrutably back at you. Have you been suckered no less easily than the "fat old Americans" who imagine that they've bought an authentically antique and exotic souvenir of Australia?
John Dugdale is the author of Thomas Pynchon (Palgrave Macmillan)
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