reading notes

by Richard Flanagan

ISBN: 0802139590

This book is “a novel in twelve fish.”

That is how it is organized, anyway, twelve sections each named after a fish. Not just any fish, but fish painted by William Buelow Gould, convict at Sarah’s Island, dreaded penal colony in early 1800s Tasmania.

Well, this book is really William Buelow Gould’s story. How he made the best of his stay at Sarah Island, painting fish for the colony’s Surgeon, until an even better deal came along and he painted that, and then everything really went to hell. See, first the fish were just a job, then he hated them, then he was obsessed with them, then he strove to paint them again, to make painting the fish his story, and the story of the penal colony.

Except that really the book is a retelling of Gould’s story, told by a modern day semi-con-artist who finds Gould’s book and becomes obsessed with it, then loses it, then tells its story.

But on the last page… no, I won’t say, because it really is worth reading the preceding 403 pages to get there. Yes, it is Gould’s story, but also like any story that talks about stories, it is about stories themselves, not just the characters or situations in them. (Well, it is about them, too: about Empire, colonization, racism, scientific progress, love, and identity.)

Flanagan has written an unusual, sprawling book. I don’t usually read things set in far different time periods, but this appealed to me. First, I will admit, it was the fish that got me to pick up the book. But by page four the stage was set and I was hooked:

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.

Highy recommended.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2003 at 3:03 pm and is filed under fiction.