Fish out of water

Books editor MARGIE THOMSON reviews the winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, a rich and strange Australian novel about a convict painter of fish.

Men as fish, fish as men?

The deserved winner of this year's Commonwealth Writers Prize is Richard Flanagan's glorious, gruesome tale of William Buelow Gould, forger, who in 1828 was sent as a convict to the worst hellhole in the Australian penal system - Sarah Island off the coast of Tasmania. There he was forced to paint for his life.

The hero of Gould's Book of Fish is a cliche of Dickensian Victoriana, an orphan whose father died in the act of his conception; whose mother died, already gone mad, at his birth. Gould was brought up in the poorhouse where fortunately he was made literate by an overfriendly priest.

In his early adulthood he picked up both his name and the skills which would determine his future. That is, he became a forger and, thus, an emblem for the world he inhabits, where nothing is as it seems, but where the possibilities are endless.

Soon after arriving at Sarah Island he is rescued from the chain gang by a summons to the abode of the settlement's surgeon, the hideous Mr Lempriere who speaks in linguistic blobs and always in capitals - "MAN MUST FIND HIS METIER - YOURS I BELIEVE - YOU HAVE FOUND - EN UN MOT? - FISH?" - who harbours scientific ambitions and longs for membership of the British Royal Society.

Gould, who Lempriere identifies as an artist, is to make watercolour studies of Tasmanian fish for a book intended to further Lempriere's ambition.

Reluctant at first, the task eventually takes Gould over. "A fish is a truth," he comes to understand, and as he paints his first fish he "enters a venture as quixotic as it is infinite".

Each chapter of Flanagan's book is thus prefaced by a different fish which comes to represent the essence of the ensuing story or character. And what characters.

Craziest of all is the gold-masked, ever-smiling Commandant who rules with absolute authority over his republic of doomed dreams, trying to "outdo Europe by rebuilding it" on his one-mile-square island, funding his enormous ambition by selling off everything the convicts need to survive.

Gould survives for a while in his relatively privileged position as camp painter, but eventually falls foul of the authorities and finds himself in a cell that is flooded at every high tide, forcing him to bob around, gasping in the small cavity below the roof.

Between tidal washings, however, he repaints his book of fish and records his story, in the absence of inks using body fluids and other natural substances.

Hence, purportedly, the book that we the readers now may hold in our hands, in which every chapter is indeed printed in ink of a different colour.

It opens in our own time with a character, Sid Hammet, discovering Gould's book in a junk shop. It glows, sending phosphorescence onto his hands, "as if I had already begun a disturbing metamorphosis".

He begins reading, can't put it down, although the pages turn damp, and as he reaches the end the book itself dissolves into a puddle - the one that got away. Heartbroken, Hammet resolves to rewrite the book as best he can.

As it happens, a convict artist named William Buelow Gould did exist and his paintings are the ones that swim between Flanagan's chapters, and on his cover.

Little is known about him, though, and he would probably be surprised to know that his work has become a metaphor for humanity and inhumanity.

Flanagan's novel is complicated - as slippery as a fish to describe - and somehow incorporates history, invention, surreality and brutality as if these things have always been part of the same, which perhaps they have. Fundamentally, it is a wonderful meditation on polarities - as Gould puts it, "This knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary" - and one man's attempt to find some resolution to this seeming contradiction.

The result is incredibly strange. In fact, "result" is almost certainly the wrong word, implying as it does a linear progression, and a logical outcome. Rather what Flanagan offers us is a swirling black hole, where meaning first seems to expand ever-outwards, and then is sucked right back in on itself, almost to nothing.

* Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in 12 Fish by Richard Flanagan (Picador $59.95)