Rating: 
Summary: An extraordinary tale, funny, fascinating & debased
Review: A madness at once divine & profane is all the Gould sees & experiences in his wretched life, & all that he wants is rum & a soft place to lay his head. Yet all about him are madmen & such, Pickwickian monsters of depravity--& all about him are poverty & debauchery of the most bestial sort, & all he wants is a fine name to call his own & some legitimacy. Instead he finds himself a convict in Van Dieman's Land (Tasmania) in a penal colony on "Sarah Island" in a cell set near the rocks that line the shore, a cell that twice a day fills up with water forcing him to bob like a cork until his head nearly hits the ceiling, & then twice a day is emptied out to allow him to write his tale in cuttlefish ink & blood dipped from beneath his scabs upon a parchment of pages that contain his previously painted fish. The time is the early nineteenth century.It is the melancholy fortune of a modern Australian forger of antiques (to sell to gullible American tourists) & a kindred imbiber of spirits to discover in a decrepit "meat safe" this extraordinary book, Gould's Book of Fish, & to be mesmerized by it & its author only to discover that all the authorities in nineteenth century antiquities to whom he presents the book disparage it as a fraud & a fake & show him the door. And then, what is worse, as he is taking his physick of beer at a tavern it is lost or stolen, & at any rate disappeared from him, so that it haunts his memory to a great distraction until at length he is forced to rewrite from memory the entire oeuvre. Thus we have the premise & the frame for this rather extraordinary historical novel from Down Under. It is a wicked tale of the debasement of humanity, spun out in a humorous & satirical style reminiscent at once of the great novelists of the nineteenth century, of Hawthorne & Dickens & Melville with backward glances at Voltaire, set in a milieu that suggests adventures in distant lands with pirates & various other scallywags, infused with the peculiar spirit of nineteenth century science, which Richard Flanagan both deprecates & celebrates. Overlaid is a veneer of artistick struggle & accomplishment culminating in the portraits of fish. Yes, fish. These fish (& a lobster & two sea horses) are reproduced in this beautiful volume in color prints at the beginning of chapters so that one can see how Flanagan's narrator (& himself) were taken with the artistry of the painter. The type in the pages of this book (which is interestingly enough published by Grove Press) is set in a wine vermillion & a sea creature green & in octopus black & some other colors--I believe. The beguiling colors fade & return on these old eyes like faint visions, depending on whether I am using artificial light to read by or have the advantage of the sun streaming in. In short, this is an extraordinary read, like nothing else coming out of the publishing factories these days, original to a startle, fascinating & funny, a work of art that gives one once again a reason to read fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Gould's Book of Fish
Review: Gould's Book of Fish is one of the few books that left me filled with despair at the end. For, if this is what a novel is, I will never be able to produce something so delicious. The ending was pure post-modern shock. Worthy of the love of Derrida and language theorists, at once showing the world to be everything and nothing at all. What is text? What is life? few books ask these questions. And fewer books answer them as well as this one. Every book i ever read fell down one notch the day I put down The Book of Fish. Great books became Good books. and Ok books became bad or juvenile. Few authors spin theory elegantly with art. There was Chaucer, back in the day. Angela Carter and Bataille. And then there was Richard Flanagan, who took me to the enchanted depths of the sea and life filled with overgrown ruins, prisons, primal love and loss- and then blew it all up at once like so many soap bubbles. His unreliable island-bound narrator reminded me immediately of 'The Island of Doctor Moreau.' Flanagan's is a classic and fully realised character. The setting is masterful, crusted with the salt of the sea. The plot, imaginative and the themes more than consistent. No basic element of a great novel was sacrificed to explain Flanagan's love and yet feelings of terrible injustice for the mutable English language (mutable as his colonial country). because, in the end, what books are... ideas are... they're nothing more than a jumble of abc's.
Rating:
Summary: Universal Questions
Review: Great book. Has become one of my all time favorites, surpassing A Prayer for Owen Meany, Jitterbug Perfume and Life of Pie. Although it drags in places, you would be foolish to put it down. Nuggets, and even boulders, of brilliance can be found scattered throughout the book. More than just a history of Sarah Island and the surrounding area during its penal colony past, it is really a means for Flanagan to ask the big questions. To see the inescapable connection between fish and men, the past and the present, the good and the bad.
Rating:
Summary: captivating, colorful, fascinating
Review: I bought this book in hardcover based solely on its appearance. The cover is beautiful, the illustrations inside are wonderful, and the differently colored chapters intrigued me. Once I actually started reading this, I was -- pardon the pun -- hooked. It's a self-proclaimed novel but I chose to read it as historical fiction. Maybe 1 percent of it is based on fact, or maybe only the names were changed. It's such a complete story (including the illustrations and text color), you could believe this really happened. It's thrilling and funny and fantastical and gets your heart pounding and imagining running. I LOVED it, and I hoped you do too.
Rating:
Summary: Magnificent
Review: Never have I put down a book upon completion and wondered out loud if there was any truth at all to what transpired between its covers. Having finished Flanagan's marvellously cryptic tale, I felt as though I had been tricked in the best possible of ways. Every solid point in the story on which I felt I could grab and create some sort of foundation of rational explanation was, by the end of the story, as slippery and intangible as one of Gould's beautiful fish. I was left breathless, a fish out of water, at once scared of the new reality Flanagan exposes -- one in which my previous conceptions of time, memory, life and death are flipped on their heads -- and exhilarated by the vast, mysterious landscape the author lays before me. No book has made me feel the way "Gould's Book of Fish" did, and still does. Absolutely magnificent.
Rating: 
Summary: Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
Review: One day a young man discovers a strange book, a Book of Fish, written by the convict, William Beulow Gould, as he waits in solitary confinement for the day of his hanging after being convicted of, among many other things, murder. The book is written in all different colours and styles, with pages running into one another, when the author finished writing on the last page, he picked up again on the first, continuing the story between the gaps of the previous words. The young man - Sid Hammet - after a series of minor adventures involving the true identity of Gould - accidentally loses the book. But his mind cannot escape the wonders he read inside, so he decides to recreate the book as he remembers it. Thus begins the true meat of the story, a rollicking, picaresque adventure set on Sarah Island, a destitute, disgusting, decadent mess of an island, only a square mile in area, but filled to the brim with the worst convicts of the early stages of Australia's life.
Flanagan writes with vivid flair, scenes seeming to jump off the page and into the mind with consummate ease. The memorable characters were very much brought to life, while the throwaway men and women used to advance the story were exactly that: forgettable and poorly created. If we consider, however, that Gould is an artist and forger, an adventurer of the high sort, given to Villainy wherever it takes him, but ever happy, a criminal Candide, always looking on the bright side of things, then we can forgive this slip as a stylistic device rather than a weakness of the author. Gould is a perfectly realised character, and nowhere does the narration slip, or the author's true voice show through. Gould has a few stylistic tics that help to further create him as a person, replacing 'and' with '&', running words together and chopping them apart.
Thanks to a mis-spent childhood in a monastery, Gould is knowledgeable and confident in the classic literary works of his time and the ancients, sprinkling references liberally throughout his writings. Also, it seems as though many of the people he comes across in his flashbacks were actually rather famous - or more accurately, became famous after associating with him. Keats and Thomas De Quincy come to mind, among others. Many of these references are noticeable, but quite a few were obscure, as though a sly wink to those readers paying attention.
As the story progresses, a narrative pattern forms. The story progresses in waves; first, there is the build-up, where a future plot point is alluded to, then the rising crescendo as the tension mounts and Gould foreshadows both the event in question and the aftermath, using epic, dramatic language to heighten anticipation. Lastly, there is the inevitable crashing of the wave as the event enters into actuality and does not live up to the hype created. Gould is never revealed as a liar, more as a man who cannot separate the idea of what should happen to what actually did happen. His twin talents of painting and forgery - though it should be noted that both really only extend to fish - spill over into his life. Bright, vibrant colours and used to create scenery, people, places, but in the end, they are revealed to be nothing more than a cheap knock-off. This technique works very well, which is perhaps surprising, and it should be noted that the very last page, the afterword, is absolutely essential to the novel and makes everything click - something which, before reading the afterword, didn't seem necessary, but afterwards, changed the entire meaning of what came before.
While perhaps this work isn't a 'work of genius', as the front cover of the book attests, it is certainly an imaginative, evocative work that, thanks to the strengths of the imagery and of the characters, especially the narrator, stays in your mind long after the last page has been turned and the final words are read.
Rating:
Summary: Postmodern--And Funny!
Review: Richard Flanagan conceals his thoughts on postmodern power and discourse, how they create prisons of identity, within a novel about the making of a book of fish--and he does it in the most entertaining way. With lyrical prose in the mouth and mind of a deviant, he shows the slow transformation of criminal, into artist, into writer, and, finally, into fish, which, as it turns out, is what humans have become in this day and age. Along the way, he lets his narrator discover the shortcomings of Enlightenment Reason and the danger of defining individuals around the concept of what is normal. That doesn't sound like the makings of a very good novel, but Flanagan is such a skillful writer that it all works, with all the various ideas being organic to the narrative. Altogether, imaginative, well-written, darkly humorous, it is a pure pleasure to read, one of the best books written in the past five years. It's not easy, though, as the structure of the novel isn't linear and some of the events are grisly, but it's worth whatever effort you have to invest in it. Really, you should read this book.
Rating:
Summary: A rich, enigmatic work
Review: Several weeks after having read this book-twice-my head is still spinning in wonder and delight. Richard Flanagan has clearly had a lot of fun in challenging his readers with an arsenal of literary tricks-frame stories, shifting narrators, magical realism, time shifts, allusions, self-referentiality-all the while making them seem more invention than artifice. His greatest feat, though, is in the creation of one of the most memorable characters in all of modern literature: William Buelow Gould with all his aliases. Gould is the perfect vehicle not only for conveying the novel's dark humor or bearing witness to its countless acts of misanthropy, but also in proving that love and story telling are redemptive powers. When I reread the novel, I read sections from The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes at the same time. It made me appreciate even more the inventiveness of Flanagan as he reworks the historical records of Tasmania both in development of his plot and in support of his theme of history as bunk. While the novel is set in a Tasmanian prison colony during the first third of the nineteenth century, it is, nevertheless, very contemporary in the "truths" it presents. As to literary predecessors, think Catch-22, Tristram Shandy, As I Lay Dying, Heart of Darkness, and Metamorphoses.
Rating: 
Summary: Maybe so
Review: So often in the world of art something is hailed as ground breaking, brilliant, and so forth. This book does live up to the hype, however I must admit there was a tremendous amount I didn't understand. The book's first chapter is intriguing and leaves the reader with much anticipation of things to come. Unfortunately, the graphic descriptions and tales of William Gould's Book of fish were not an incredibly engaging read. Of course things do get very interesting toward the climax and end of the novel. To really appreciate this book I would have to read it again (most likely twice), to even begin understanding all the references and symbolism. With so many other books on my list, unfortunately I do not have that kind of time.
Rating: 
Summary: Spiral Dance of Despair
Review: This book proves to me what I have long suspected. Artists are, not so slowly, ripping our civilisation to pieces to replace it with a defiled, sad, empty, nothingness.
The psychophantic, cliche ridden, picture of Aboriginals is almost 'de rigour' for modern artists and is the only uplifting picture in the book. Everything else points downwards and the glowing reviews from all the major papers points to a general demise.
It does what a lot of modern literature does to me, it hangs a lead weight on my soul.
Another bright brother in the gutter who's mind has never looked up!
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