Gould's Book of Fish

[Richard Romeo]

I have to say this new novel by Richard Flanagan is quite interesting.  I'll 
post a summary.  Beyond the story, the physical book itself is beautifully 
packaged.

>From the Publisher
The most remarkable novel yet from the internationally acclaimed author of 
Death of a River Guide and The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould's Book of 
Fish is a marvelous historical epic of nineteenth-century Australia, a world 
of convicts and colonists, thieves and catamites, whose bloody history is 
recorded in a very unusual taxonomy of fish. It is the kind of book that 
comes along once in a very great while — a book of breathtaking writing and 
intellectual inquiry that stands out as one of the best novels of recent 
years. William Buelow Gould was a forger and thief sentenced to life 
imprisonment in a penal colony in Van Diemen's Land — now Tasmania. After 
six months he escaped and boarded a whaler for the Americas, but before long 
his adventures landed him back in prison. The prison doctor Lempriere 
utilized Gould's painting talents to create an illustrated taxonomy of the 
country's exotic sea creatures, which Lempriere madly believed would ensure 
his place in history and the Royal Society. Gould's book was then lost and 
re-created, destroyed and hidden, and finally resurfaced in the present day, 
littered with Gould's scrawls recording his unutterably strange life — part 
freewheeling picaresque, part Gothic horror — and that of his country, a 
penal colony, settlement, and magical space populated by generals, 
visionaries, and madmen. This is an exquisitely produced book: each chapter 
is printed in a different colored ink to re-create its narrator's writing 
conditions, and each chapter opening will include a reproduction of the 
original full-color artwork by William Gould. Reminiscent of the richness 
and historical audacity of Jeanette Winterson's The Passion,Jim Crace's 
Quarantine, and Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon, Gould's Book of Fish is a 
tour de force that interrogates the reliability of history and science, and 
the substance of artistic creation.


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