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You hold it all in, just as Flanagan’s father must have done. When you talk about such violence, you naturally lower your voice. The guards are as bestial the condition of the convicts worse than that accorded to the homicidal pig Castlereigh. The horrors of a penal colony are no less than a Japanese POW camp. It would have made perfect sense for Gould’s Book of Fish, too. That creative choice makes sense to me, given the horror of its setting. Flanagan strips each sentence of all emotion. The writing in The Narrow Road is elegant and austere. Prisoner san byaku san ju go (335), the Japanese number given to him as a PoW. Set on the Burma Railroad, Flanagan dedicated The Narrow Road to his father: But I didn’t know his work until The Narrow Road Into the Deep North won the Man Booker Prize in 2014.
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Richard Flanagan was already a celebrated author in his native Australia by the time he wrote Gould’s Book of Fish. I am William Buelow Gould & I mean to paint for you as best as I can, which is but poorly, which is but a rude man’s art, the sound of water on stone, the fool’s dream of the hard giving way to the soft, & I hope you will come to see reflected in my translucent watercolours not patches of the white cartridge paper beneath, but the very opacity of the souls themselves. Throughout this “novel in twelve fish”, Gould introduces himself to the reader until it is we who begin to doubt our own sanity. He’s as impossible to grasp and made to sit still as his beloved fish, the objects of his art. I am compelled by my lack of virtue to tell you that I am the most untrustworthy guide you will ever trust, a man dead before his time, a forger convicted in the gloomy recesses of the Bristol Assizes on that muggy afternoon of 10 July 1825.īut Gould is a shapeshifter. I am William Buelow Gould – convicted murderer, painter & numerous other unimportant things. What sort of person finds joy in hell? shapeshifting Sometimes I smile back, & if & when I am feeling especially energetic, I’ll lob a turd I’ve kept especially for the occasion in return. Sometimes they bring me a taj of skilly & rancid pork fat in a cup or a bowl, & they throw it at me. When the tide goes back out, Gould can resume his warfare with the jailors. He bobs about in his saltwater bath, clinging to the bars so that he can breathe in the foot of air space that remains in his cell. Then this cell, built at the base of sandstone cliffs below the high water mark will fill to above my head. When I once more feel that sharp smarting around the scabby sores that cluster like so many oysters on my ankles beneath my chained iron basils, I know that the tide has turned. Nature is as cruel as the convict-overseers of this place. Gould speaks to us from inside his jail cell. The inhumanity of a penal colony has been well-documented. From love interest Twopenny Sal to the trickster Capois Death and the oh-so-unreliable narrator William Buelow Gould. Set in the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, the place teems with outrageous characters. Gould’s Book of Fish is a firecracker of a novel.