Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish Read online

  About the Book

  Once upon a time that was called 1828, before all fishes in the sea and all living things on the land were destroyed, there was a man named William Buelow Gould, a white convict who fell in love with a black woman and discovered too late that to love is not safe. Silly Billy Gould, invader of Australia, liar, murderer & forger, condemned to the most feared penal colony in the British Empire and there ordered to paint a book of fish.

  Once upon a time, there were miracles …

  Acclaimed around the world as a masterpiece, Richard Flanagan’s Commonwealth Prize-winning novel is published for the first time in Vintage Classics.

  ‘A work of significant genius’ CHICAGO TRIBUNE

  Praise for Gould’s Book of Fish

  ‘A masterpiece.’ —The Times

  ‘I have read nothing finer than Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan. Lyrical and hilarious, tender and wildly angry by turns, it reimagines the grim early history of Tasmania and at the same time dazzlingly reconceives the form of the novel.’ —Peter Conrad, The Observer

  ‘[Flanagan is] … one of the novel’s most ambitious talents, one whose every book … commands our attention.’ —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  ‘A seamless masterpiece.’ —The Independent on Sunday

  ‘A work of pure brilliance.’ —The Seattle Times

  ‘Most good novels arrive out of some quarrel with reality – an impossible romance, tragic loss, a social broadside of satirical anger. A few great ones raise an all-out war cry and trawl with abandon across all the familiar categories of fictional invention. Gould’s Book of Fish … is just such a great book, by turns bawdy and pensive, moving and abrasive, visionary and squalid, apocalyptic and confessional.’ —The Washington Post

  ‘One part Rabelais, one part García Márquez, one part Ned Kelly.’ —The New York Times Book Review

  ‘Gould’s Book of Fish is a novel about fish the way that Moby Dick is a novel about a whale or Ulysses is a novel about the events of a single day … a wondrous, phantasmagorical meditation on art and history and nature.’ —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  ‘An astonishing masterpiece that challenges, provokes, and entertains at every turn.’ —Star Tribune

  ‘This remarkable novel is a meditation on colonialism – indeed, on history itself – couched in the story of an English guttersnipe … Flanagan also supplies one of the most profound sex scenes in recent literature … A serene, chilling vision of human life as comparable to the life of fish, “swimming in vast coldness, alone”.’ —The New Yorker

  ‘[Flanagan’s] writing has the unmistakeable shimmer of literary star quality.’ —New Statesman

  ‘It ushers in a range of ideas that much contemporary writing grasps at but ends up simply nodding to … hugely original … There is so much to savour in this rolling, picaresque tale of grotesques and their progress: so much unfettered imagination, so much sly irony and comic anarchy. Passages burn with the intense pleasure of story-making, of the abandon that comes from a seething of ideas and their joyful mutation into words.’ —The Guardian

  ‘Is it a masterpiece? Halfway through my second read, I know so.’ —Good Reading

  ‘I became convinced that this was a truly great book that would be read by serious people long after most of the literary fiction of our time is forgotten.’ —Richard Holloway, The Herald (Glasgow)

  ‘A brilliantly rendered work of the imagination that investigates the complex relationships among art, ordinary human life and the natural world with great intelligence and unquestionable panache … The book is full of wild hilarity, heartbreaking cruelty and suffering, and finally love, both selfless and profane … A work of significant genius.’ —Chicago Tribune

  ‘Ferocious in its anger, grotesque, sexy, funny, violent, startlingly beautiful and, above all, heartbreakingly sad … I urge you to read it.’ —Robert MacFarlane, The Observer

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Praise for Gould’s Book of Fish

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Pot-Bellied Seahorse

  The Kelpy

  The Porcupine Fish

  The Stargazer

  The Leatherjacket

  The Serpent Eel

  The Sawtooth Shark

  The Striped Cowfish

  The Crested Weedfish

  The Freshwater Crayfish

  The Silver Dory

  The Weedy Seadragon

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Also by Richard Flanagan

  Death of a River Guide

  Gould’s Book of Fish

  The Unknown Terrorist

  Wanting

  And What Do You Do, Mr Gable?

  Copyright Page

  More at Random House Australia

  For Rosie, Jean and Eliza,

  swimming in ever widening rings of wonder.

  My mother is a fish.

  William Faulkner

  THE POT-BELLIED SEAHORSE

  Discovery of the Book of Fish—Fake furniture and faith healing—The Conga—Mr Hung and Moby Dick—Victor Hugo and God—A snowstorm—On why history and stories have nothing in common—The book disappears—Death of Great Aunt Maisie—My seduction—A male seahorse gives birth—The fall.

  1

  MY WONDER UPON discovering the Book of Fish remains with me yet, luminous as the phosphorescent marbling that seized my eyes that strange morning; glittering as those eerie swirls that coloured my mind and enchanted my soul—which there and then began the process of unravelling my heart and, worse still, my life into the poor, scraggy skein that is this story you are about to read.

  What was it about that gentle radiance that would come to make me think I had lived the same life over and over, like some Hindu mystic forever trapped in the Great Wheel? that was to become my fate? that stole my character? that rendered my past and my future one and indivisible?

  Was it that mesmeric shimmer spiralling from the unruly manuscript out of which seahorses and seadragons and stargazers were already swimming, bringing dazzling light to a dreary day not long born? Was it that sorry vanity of thought which made me think contained within me was all men and all fish and all things? Or was it something more prosaic—bad company and worse drink—which has led to the monstrous pass in which I now find myself?

  Character and fate, two words, writes William Buelow Gould, for the same thing—one more matter about which he was, as ever, incisively wrong.

  Dear, sweet, silly Billy Gould and his foolish tales of love, so much love that it is not possible now, and was not possible then, for him to continue. But I fear I am already digressing.

  We—our histories, our souls—are, I have since come to believe in consequence of his stinking fish, in a process of constant decomposition and reinvention, and this book, I was to discover, was the story of my compost heap of a heart.

  Even my feverish pen cannot approach my rapture, an amazement so intense that it was as if the moment I opened the Book of Fish the rest of my world—the world!—had been cast into darkness and the only light that existed in the entire universe was that which shone out of those aged pages up into my astonished eyes.

  I was without work, there being little enough of it in Tasmania then and even less now. Perhaps my mind was more susceptible to miracles than it might otherwise have been. Perhaps as a poor Portuguese peasant girl sees the Madonna because she doesn’t wish to see anything else, I too longed to be blind to my own world. Perhaps if Tasmania had been a normal place where you had a proper job, spent hours in t
raffic in order to spend more hours in a normal crush of anxieties waiting to return to a normal confinement, and where no-one ever dreamt what it was like to be a seahorse, abnormal things like becoming a fish wouldn’t happen to you.

  I say perhaps, but frankly I am not sure.

  Maybe this sort of thing goes on all the time in Berlin and Buenos Aires, and people are just too embarrassed to own up to it. Maybe the Madonna comes all the time to the New York projects and the high-rise horrors of Berlin and the western suburbs of Sydney, and everybody pretends she’s not there and hopes she’ll just go away soon and not embarrass them any further. Maybe the new Fatima is somewhere in the vast wastelands of the Revesby Workers’ Club, a halo over the pokie screen that blinks ‘BLACKJACK FEVER’.

  Could it be that when all backs are turned, when all faces are focused on the pokie monitors, there is no-one left to witness the moment an old woman levitates as she fills in her Keno form? Maybe we have lost the ability, that sixth sense that allows us to see miracles and have visions and understand that we are something other, larger than what we have been told. Maybe evolution has been going on in reverse longer than I suspect, and we are already sad, dumb fish. Like I say, I am not sure, and the only people I trust, such as Mr Hung and the Conga, aren’t sure either.

  To be honest, I have come to the conclusion that there is not much in this life that one can be sure about. Despite what may come to seem to you as mounting evidence to the contrary, I value truth, but as William Buelow Gould continued to ask of his fish long after they were dead from his endless futile queries, where is truth to be found?

  As for me, they have taken the book and everything away now, and what are books anyway but unreliable fairy tales?

  Once upon a time there was a man called Sid Hammet and he discovered he was not who he thought he was.

  Once upon a time there were miracles, and the aforementioned Hammet believed he had been swept up in one. Until that day he had lived by his wits, which is another, kinder way of saying that his life was an ongoing act of disillusionment. After that day he was to suffer the cruel malaise of belief.

  Once upon a time there was a man called Sid Hammet who saw reflected in the glow of a strange book of fish his story, which began as a fairy tale and ended as a nursery rhyme, riding a cock-horse to Banbury Cross.

  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.

  II

  UNTIL THAT TIME I had devoted myself to buying old pieces of rotting furniture which I further distressed with every insult conceivable. While I belted the sorry cupboards with hammers to enhance the pathetic patina, as I relieved myself on the old metalwork to promote the putrid verdigris, yelling all manner of vile curses to make myself feel better, I would imagine that such pieces of furniture were the tourists who were their inevitable purchasers, buying what they mistakenly thought to be flotsam of the romantic past, rather than what they were, evidence of a rotten present.

  My Great Aunt Maisie said it was a miracle that I had found any work, and I felt she would know, for had she not taken me at the age of seven to the North Hobart oval in the beautiful ruby light of late winter to miraculously assist North Hobart win the football semi-final? She sprinkled Lourdes holy water from a tiny bottle on the muddy sods of the ground. The Great John Devereaux was captain coach and I was wrapped in the Demons’ red and blue scarf, like an Egyptian’s mummified cat, with only big curious eyes visible. I ran out at three-quarter time to peek through a mighty forest of the players’ Deepheat-aromaed thighs and hear the Great John Devereaux deliver a rousing speech.

  North Hobart were down a dozen goals and I knew he would say something remarkable to his players, and the Great John Devereaux was not a man to disappoint his followers. ‘Get your minds off the fucking sheilas,’ he said. ‘You, Ronnie, forget that Jody. As for you, Nobby, the sooner you get that Mary out of your mind, the better.’ And so on. It was marvellous to hear all those girls’ names and know they meant so much to such giants at three-quarter time. When they then won, kicking into the wind, I knew that love and water was a truly unbeatable combination.

  But to return to my work with furniture, it was, as Rennie Conga (this, I hasten to say, lest some of her family read this and take umbrage, was not exactly her name, but no-one could ever remember her full Italian surname and it somehow seemed to fit her sinuous body and the close, dark clothes with which she chose to clad that serpentine form), my then probation officer, put it, a post with prospects, particularly when the cruise ships full of fat old Americans came by. With their protruding bellies, shorts, odd thin legs and odder big white shoes dotting the end of those oversize bodies, the Americans were endearing question marks of human beings.

  I say endearing, but what I really mean to say is that they had money.

  They also had their tastes, which were peculiar, but where commerce was concerned I was fond enough of them—and they of me. And for a time the Conga and I did a good line in old chairs which she had bought at an auction when yet one more Tasmanian headquarters of a government department had closed down. These I painted in several bright enamel paints, sanded back, lightly shredded with a vegetable grater, pissed on and passed off as Shaker furniture that had come out with whalers from Nantucket last century in, as we would say in answer to the question marks, their ceaseless search of the southern oceans for the great leviathans.

  It was the story, really, that the tourists were buying, of the only type that they would ever buy—an American story, a happy, stirring tale of Us Finding Them Alive and Bringing Them Back Home—and for a time it was a good story. So much so that we ran out of stock and the Conga was forced to set up a production side to our venture, securing a deal with a newly arrived Vietnamese family, while I had the story neatly typed up along with some genuine authentication labels by a bogus organisation we called the Van Diemonian Antiquarian Association.

  The Vietnamese’s story (his name was Lai Phu Hung but the Conga, who believed in respect, always insisted on us calling him Mr Hung) was as interesting as any old whaling tale, his family’s flight from Vietnam more perilous, their voyage in an overcrowded and derelict fishing junk to Australia more desperate, and they were better at scrimshaw to boot—a sideline, I should add, in which we also did a respectable trade. As the templates for his bone carving, Mr Hung used the woodcut illustrations out of an old Modern Library edition of Moby Dick.

  But he and his family had no Melville, no Ishmael or Queequeg or Ahab on the quarterdeck, no romantic past, only their troubles and dreams like the rest of us, and it was all too dirtily, irredeemably human to be worth anything to the voracious question marks. To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human.

  They wanted stories, I came to realise, in which they were already imprisoned, not stories in which they appeared along with the storyteller, accomplices in escaping. They wanted you to say, ‘Whalers’, so they might reply, ‘Moby Dick’, and summon images from the mini-series of the same name; so you might then say, ‘Antique’, so they might reply, ‘How much?’

  Those sort of stories.

  The type that pay.

  Not like Mr Hung’s tales, which no question marks ever wanted to hear, something of which Mr Hung seemed extraordinarily accepting, in part because his true ambition was not to be a steam-crane driver as he had been in Hai-Phong City, but a poet, a dream that allowed him to affect a Romantic resignation to the indifference of a callous world.

  For Mr Hung’s religion was literature, literally. He belonged to the Cao Dai, a Buddhist sect that regarded Victor Hugo as a god. In addition to worshipping the deity’s novels, Mr Hung seemed knowledgeable about (and intimated a certain spiritual communion with) several other greats of nineteenth-century French writing of whom, beyond their names—and sometimes not even that—I knew nothin
g.

  Being in Hobart and not Hai-Phong City, the tourists cared not a jot for the likes of Mr Hung, and they certainly weren’t going to give us any money for his tales about steam cranes, or his father’s cranes that fished, or his poetry, or, for that matter, his thoughts on the connections between God and Gallic literature. And so instead Mr Hung dug out a small workshop beneath his old Zinc Company house in Lutana and set to work building fake antique chairs and carving ersatz whalebone to complement our more sordid fictions.

  And why should Mr Hung or his family or the Conga or I have cared anyway?

  The tourists had money and we needed it; they only asked in return to be lied to and deceived and told that single most important thing, that they were safe, that their sense of security—national, individual, spiritual—wasn’t a bad joke being played on them by a bored and capricious destiny. To be told that there was no connection between then and now, that they didn’t need to wear a black armband or have a bad conscience about their power and their wealth and everybody else’s lack of it; to feel rotten that no-one could or would explain why the wealth of a few seemed so curiously dependent on the misery of the many. We kindly pretended that it was about buying and selling chairs, about them asking questions about price and heritage, and us replying in like manner.

  But it wasn’t about price and heritage, it wasn’t about that at all.

  The tourists had insistent, unspoken questions and we just had to answer as best we could, with forged furniture. They were really asking, ‘Are we safe?’ and we were really replying, ‘No, but a barricade of useless goods may help block the view.’ And because hubris is not just an ancient Greek word but a human sense so deep-seated we might better regard it as an unerring instinct, they were also wanting to know, ‘If it is our fault, then will we suffer?’ and we were really replying, ‘Yes, and slowly, but a fake chair may make us both feel better about it.’ I mean it was a living, and if it wasn’t that good, nor was it all that bad, and while I would carry as many chairs as we could sell, I wasn’t about to carry the weight of the world.