“And when I had finished painting & looked at that poor leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the world was reduced in the amount of love that you might know for such a creature. Whether there was that much less wonder & beauty left to go round as each fish was hauled up in the net. And if we kept on taking & plundering & killing, if the world kept on becoming ever more impoverished of love & wonder & beauty in consequence, what, in the end, would be left?”
Plot: The story of William Buelow Gould, from his point of view, which is not what the history books tell. Petty thief, liar, painter, he ends up on a Tasmanian penal colony where things getter stranger than fiction. Despite his many flaws, Gould is able to ascertain the beauty of life, and how we squander it without a second thought.
Why read it?: Flanagan is a brilliant writer, and basically invents a shaggy dog story out of a relic of history. Gould's forays into the heart of darkness is at times tremendously humorous, while simultaneously being sad and angry, as we witness, much like in English Passengers, the destruction of an entire culture, for no reason other than greed and thoughtlessness,
This would fall into the category of speculative, or maybe better, reimagined historical fiction. There was a William Buelow Gould, who was banished to Van Diemen's Land in the nineteenth century and did make a name for himself as an artist, including his book of fish. Tasmanian Richard Flanagan's novel uses that as a starting point in creating a weird, funny, and engrossing story of identity, racial relations, and the sad extermination of an entire group of people.
Flanagan uses a framing story to introduce to Gould - an aimless con artist comes across Gould's unknown diary, written on scraps of paper, or any other available flat material, using a variety of liquids, including blood, as ink. No one believes the diary to be real - it just doesn't agree with history. This is one of the main ideas of the book - what we know of as history depends on who gets to write it, and its not always the most reliable sources that get to do so.
The Gould we get to know is not a noble character; he is a criminal and a lackluster one at that. He picks up some artistic skills as a young man, but painting is mainly a way of survival for him, not a passion. He eventually ends up on Sarah Island, the worst of the worst penal colonies. By Gould's account, the man in charge of the island is in fact an escaped convict, who by being the lone survivor of a shipwreck, is able to pass himself off a British naval officer. Through more luck, he ends up in charge of the penal colony. Unfortunately, the trauma of the shipwreck and his survival have robbed him of his sanity. He soon takes to wearing a gold mask and a coat made of bird feathers. And creating the world's strangest penal colony. Starved for funds from the British, he soon establishes a shipbuilding enterprise using prison labor, a timber business that deforests much of the island, and a variety of trade deals with the Japanese and others. Through a series of letters with his supposed sister (he is impersonating a real officer after all) he hears of all that is happening in Europe. When trains become the newest thing, he wants his own and buys the equipment. Soon Sarah Island has its own railway, but due to the small size of the island, it only goes around in a small loop (the hope that it will magically link to the great railways of Europe, alas, never come to fruition).
Gould, due to his painting abilities, is spared from hard labor, and gets a job as a gofer for the chief doctor and science officer, Lempriere, a large, strange man who seems to be straight out of a Dicken's novel. Hoping to achieve membership into the Royal Society, he tasks Gould with making drawing of the fish of Macquarie Harbour. Gould's resulting fish provide the motif's for each of the book's chapters. The story becomes darker; Lempriere, having lost out on the fish project, turns to a study of the aborigine's brain size, which of course requires samples that can be sent back to England. Lempriere ends up himself as a meal (of a large hungry pig). Gould is convicted of his murder and awaits execution in a prison cell that floods twice daily with the tide. It is here that Gould creates his diary, often writing with his own blood, or the ink from captured sea urchins.
The novel is full of blood and other bodily fluids, death and mindless destruction. Gould though, learns to see the beauty in the world, both natural and that created by man. The juxtaposition of the two paths is what Gould can not reconcile.
Flanagan is a wonderful writer; this book always has a sense of humor throughout what is a horribly tragic story. Much like The English Passengers, another book that details the demise of the aborigines of Tasmania by white men, the senselessness of the wholesale destruction of a people, repeated so often, and which affects all of our lives to this day, is brought into great focus
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