ALL THE PRETTY FISHES

Surely one of the most eccentric novels to appear in recent years, “Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in 12 Fish” by Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan, rivals other ambitiously weird fictional works of our time. From David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” to Thomas Pynchon’s “Mason & Dixon,” fictional high fliers have attempted to slip free of sturdy old realism by summoning the odd alternate universe, always running the risk that readers will be distracted by the little man behind the curtain, frantically working the machinery that supplies the magic. “Gould’s Book of Fish” is such an experiment: by turns enchanting, bemusing and irritating.

Purporting to be the re-creation of a lost manuscript of William Buelow Gould, an actual convict in the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land (the original name for Tasmania), the novel reproduces 12 astonishing watercolors of native fish from the actual “Book of Fish,” owned by the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts in the State Library of Tasmania. The chapters are printed in a different color ink (red, purple, brown, blue, green), corresponding to the different substances (lapis lazuli, sea urchins, human blood and feces) that the desperately inventive Gould uses to pen his bizarre memoir.

Although hardly as melodramatic as his character’s, Flanagan’s career has had a picaresque air. Born and raised in Tasmania (where he still lives), a descendant of Irish convict ancestors who arrived in the 1840s, Flanagan remembers reenacting his father’s experiences in a World War II Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Burma while on seaside holidays as a child:

“In our shack we shared in his annual exorcism,” he wrote in an Austrialian magazine earlier this year. “We six children would line up and recite one to 10 in Japanese or his number that he had once called at roll call in jungle camps. He would inspect our bunk beds to make sure our blankets were folded in the manner decreed by the imperial Japanese jailers--with the fold out.”

A champion whitewater kayaker, Flanagan left school at 16 to work as a river guide, an unusual apprenticeship for someone who ultimately became a Rhodes scholar. He subsequently dismissed Oxford as “the most grossly over-rated institution.” He wrote his first book, a history of southwest Tasmania, at 21, followed by several more nonfiction works of history and biography.

His first novel, “Death of a River Guide” (1994), was something of a revelation: A Faulknerian homage in which Tasmania’s tragic history of penal colonies--the rape of its native people and natural beauty by the British and its subsequent colonization by a welter of nationalities--is seen through the eyes of a river guide, Aljaz Cosini, who is drowning beneath a waterfall on the Franklin River, his life and those of his forebears flashing before him. It was an astonishing tour-de-force, lyrically written and bringing to life a place and history that most readers outside of Australia had barely glimpsed (and might have missed altogether, because the book received little attention in Australia and was not published here until 2001).

Flanagan’s next project involved writing and directing a feature film about a family of Slovenian immigrants in Tasmania, “The Sound of One Hand Clapping.” While awaiting funding for the film, Flanagan rewrote the story as a novel, which was published to great acclaim in Australia in 1997--winning major prizes and selling about 150,000 copies--but the project soured its author on film. Given to rebellious Russell-Crowe-style outbursts, Flanagan told the press that movie-making was “the closest thing I’ve come across to a tyrannical state” and subsequently revealed that his next novel had been deliberately written to be “unfilmable.”

“Gould’s Book of Fish” is that unfilmable book, Flanagan’s ninth work and third novel, an extended peroration on what its central character terms “Literature & Art, those sick & broken compasses.” It begins with a classic first-person framing device: Sid Hammet is a modern-day Tasmanian entrepreneur who concocts fake antiques--”old chairs ... painted in several bright enamel paints, sanded back, lightly shredded with a vegetable grater, pissed on and passed off as Shaker furniture that had come out with whalers from Nantucket last century”--to sell to the “fat old Americans ... with their protruding bellies, shorts, odd thin legs and odder big white shoes dotting the end of those oversize bodies.” A familiar type in Flanagan’s work, Hammet is eaten away by the corrosive self-loathing and universalized contempt inspired by this commerce:

“The tourists had money and we needed it; they only asked in return to be lied to and deceived and told that single most important thing, that they were safe, that their sense of security--national, individual, spiritual--wasn’t a bad joke being played on them by a bored and capricious destiny ... that they didn’t need to ... have a bad conscience about their power and their wealth and everybody else’s lack of it; to feel rotten that no-one could or would explain why the wealth of a few seemed so curiously dependent on the misery of the many. We kindly pretended that it was about buying and selling chairs, about them asking questions about price and heritage, and us replying in like manner.”

In just such a black mood, he stumbles across the “Book of Fish”--a magical manuscript glowing purple--inside a meat safe in a junk shop and is instantly “washed far away by the stories that accompanied these fish” and the watercolors that are so vividly moving that Hammet is convinced its author “felt in colours.”

After he reads it, the document dissolves into a puddle of brackish water on a bar counter, and we’re propelled through the looking glass as Hammet somehow takes on the mantle of the “Book’s” narrator, becoming William Buelow Gould, 19th century petty thief and forger sentenced to Van Diemen’s Land, rotting in a cell below the high tide line on Sarah Island, the most brutal of the Tasmanian penal colonies. From this cell, intermittently awash in sea water, awaiting execution, Gould tells a rollicking tale of disasters enlivened by the odd drunken binge or sexual peccadillo: His orphaned childhood in a poorhouse, succored by a pedophile priest; his New World apprenticeship as a naturalist and artist with “Jean-Babeuf Audubon” and fraternization with George Keats (brother of the poet); his transportation to Van Diemen’s Land and subsequent escape, adventures and re-arrest; his terrifying encounters with the insane gold-masked Commandant of Sarah Island and stolen frolics with the Commandant’s aboriginal mistress, Twopenny Sal; and his probationary period painting fish for the deranged surgeon Lempriere--”so rotund he looked as if he had been coopered rather than conceived”--who hopes to use the paintings to secure his admission to the Royal Society.

To list Gould’s exploits in this fashion, however, gives the false impression that the story is told in a chronological fashion; in fact, it’s so hallucinatory and fantastical--so often interrupted by asides or out-of-order recollections--that the reader feels, finally, buffeted and confused. Gould is another of Flanagan’s representative Tasmanian characters-in-extremis (in his first novel, the protagonist was dying; here, he’s already dead) witnessing horrific misery while expressing an otherworldly (and ultimately unconvincing) joie de vivre. But he seems less a fully fleshed character than a messenger bearing the repetitive news that bad things happened in Van Diemen’s Land. No instance of torture, depravity or brutality has been left out: Gould and his cohort of fellow prisoners and prison officials--Lempriere, Capois Death, Pobjoy, the Commandant--suffer or commit traumatic amputations of virtually every conceivable body part; wield or endure baroque devices of torture; and seal up in barrels the decapitated heads of a number of “blackfellas.” Nothing is too outrageous: In an unfortunate echo of Hannibal Lecter, an enormous swine named Castlereagh attacks and consumes Lempriere, whose skull is subsequently added to one of the aforementioned barrels. (Putting a pig in a novel these days is like hanging a pistol on the wall; you know it’s going to eat somebody by the third act).

The colored typefaces likewise seem a failed experiment, both technically and thematically. In my copy, the supposedly scarlet ink (from Gould’s blood) is a brownish hue, scarcely distinguishable from the sepia tone (cuttlefish ink) of the next chapter, but what’s worse is that there seems little justification for such an elaborate feat. While the reproductions of Gould’s fish are integral to the story, the colored type is typically explained in a throwaway paragraph. The whole exercise comes to seem self-indulgent. In the purple chapter, Gould “make[s] no apologies for what is ... both obvious & necessary: that the prose which follows is also of a similar hue.” This invites the reader to an irresistible observation: that the purpling of Flanagan’s prose--despite its energy and inventiveness--eventually palls here; there can be only so many repetitions of words like “fetid” and “putrid”; so many descriptions of “the effluvium of death

Flanagan first encountered the real “Book of Fish” 15 years ago, but he has said that the novel is not historical: “I dislike historical novels. I am trained as a historian, and they seem fraudulent. You can’t re-create the past; you can only write a contemporary novel that uses the past to speak about ideas.” There, perhaps, lies the flaw of “Gould’s Book of Fish”: It is perilous, if not impossible, to use novels to “speak about ideas.” What’s memorable--even extraordinary--about this book are Flanagan’s aphoristic talent, his imagination and his uncanny ability to channel the Rabelaisian voices of the great picaresque writers--Fielding, Sterne, Smollett. But in this particular high-wire act, the author loses hold of the guy wires: plot and character. Nonetheless, this strange writer remains unique, one of the novel’s most ambitious talents, one whose every book--success or failure--commands our attention.