Rating: 
Summary: Madness And Fish, Down Under
Review: This book was recommended to me by an esteemed colleage as an example of "fine literary fiction." So of course I got hold of it at once. Most unusual novel. As best I can determine, the novel centers around the tormented life of William Buelow Gould, possibly an actual person, who spent much of his adult life as a prisoner in the notorious Sarah Island penal colony in Tasmania in the early nineteenth century. While enduring the most degrading existence imaginable, and undergoing heinous tortures, Gould somehow manages to become a skilled water-colorist. He is commissioned by prison officalry to paint the island's fish (along with other insane, grandiose projects), and what results is a collection of twelve fine watercolors of local fish, interspersed with Gould's disjointed memoirs. So much for the plot. Actually plot is irrelevant, for the author seemingly sets out to create maximum confusion, multiple levels of reality, dreamlike sequences that escalate from the merely insane to the cataclysmic. The author asks us to follow him through this maelstrom of ideas and to ask ourselves, what is reality? Is reality something we create with our thoughts? Author Flanagan is obviously brilliant, clever, and exceedingly erudite. Unfortunately, he does not make things easy for his readers. I found the book very slow going. Although there are moments of high entertainment and ribald humor, there are far too many pages of rambling and circular discourse. There is also far too much description of bodily fluids (and gases), horrible tortures, and painful death. This is a remarkable book, but not for everyone. If you like to puzzle your way through symbols, allusions, imagery and metaphor, well, this one might be for you. For my money it was over-rated. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber
Rating: 
Summary: The Slimy Scales of Justice
Review: What could anyone have done to deserve the fate of William Buelow Gould? The worst that can be said of his character in "Gould's Book of Fish" is that he makes a habit of living on the wrong side of fate. From his random and illegitimate birth to an Irish maid and a Jewish laborer in the early 19th century, through his routine incarcerations for the most ridiculous non-offenses, he stands as a symbol the pain, brutality and aching beauty of his times.
From the book's outset there's a sense of evanescent, transformative magic amid the menace of William Gould's life.
He speaks to the reader first through the ministrations of a devoted, twentieth century seeker of beauty, who finds Gould's original autobiography, a collection of obsessive scribblings and startling icthyological illustrations, stuck in the prison of an antique chest in a junk shop. When the book is mysteriously lost, its bereft and obsessed owner sets out to recreate the work with the extra authenticity of a disciple's devotion.
So this is a book about a book. And from the outset, Flanagan's writing makes it a triumph of revelation and humanity. This is no small task, considering that the bulk of William Buelow Gould's star crossed existence takes place on Sarah Island, Tasmania's own answer to the Devil's Island of Papillon fame. The startling, eloquent language Flanagan employs to outline the savagery of this most infernal place is one of the book's many strengths. It has all the elegance and eloquence of the language of its times while retaining a sense of intimacy and immediacy.
William Buelow Gould's life a riot of debacles that go well beyond Rabelaisian levels of debasement. His tormentors include the colony's Commandant, who, under an assumed identity, sets out to create a Potemkin village of European enlightenment amidst the insanity of his own being and environs; the physican, who meets with a undignified gustatory end at the hands of his monstrous pet pig; and the guard, with whose corpse, through a series of bizarre and surreal events, he shares a cell that fills with water at the coming of the high tide.
Taken under the wing of the physician, Gould's artistic talents are put to work in the service of a primitive form of eugenics. He's commissioned to create a book of fish to rival the one of birds by the celebrated Audubon, the better to raise the esteem of the physician among the men of science towering over the enlightment at home. Through his compliance, Gould finds a way to transform himself, and his world, in a way that defies all the evil that humans can foment.
The only logical conclusion that the reader can draw in this supremely surreal novel is that there is no art, or life, without suffering. Few literary characters have suffered as much for art as William Buelow Gould. And fewer modern authors have created an historical novel with so much mystery, color, and wisdom.
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