Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

by Richard Flanagan

  It had drifted in to the cell with the tide last night & I managed to spear it with my paintbrush as the tide went out this morning. A poor creature swept up in something greater than itself, it spewed its dark ink up at me with as much fearful fury as it could muster. Though I copped some in the eye & a bit in the gob, I managed to catch a good third of it in my skilly bowl, & with this dark ink that dries to the shitty colour of this shitty settlement, I put all these memories down.

  ‘Fish were what were crying out to be next Systematised & thereby Understood,’ Mr Cosmo Wheeler had written the Surgeon, ‘& someone in as privileged a position as you, my dear Lempriere, as to be able to collect & record a whole new Exotic World of Fish!’

  I recall that I did not feel the rum in either my mouth or throat as I drained the glass in a single gulp, my eyes still focused on his milky peepers as the Surgeon went on detailing the contents of Mr Cosmo Wheeler’s most recent correspondence with him.

  ‘And,’ added Mr Cosmo Wheeler in a rhetorical query, ‘is it not out of such happy coincidences of Place (Macquarie Harbour—Transylvania—Van Diemen’s Land) & Genius (Tobias Achilles Lempriere) that History is so often made?’

  Because he valued his amateur collector - naturalist so highly, continued Mr Cosmo Wheeler, he would be willing—if the specimens proved sufficiently novel, the pictures of a proper standard—to reproduce the fish in his next work, tentatively titled Systema Naturae Australis.

  The Surgeon had talked so long & so hard that he had allowed me the privilege of not having to say anything that might expose my story of being an Artist for the lie it was. He had so cleverly convinced himself of my own worth that even I briefly succumbed to the vanity of believing it might just be possible for me to paint accurate pictures of fish of the highest scientifick standard.

  Not that I said so, or said anything.

  To tell the entire truth, I wasn’t able to get a word in. The Surgeon interpreted my inability to interrupt as only the necessary & praiseworthy servility I now owed him as my new patron, an acknowledgment of the supremacy of power that was as necessary to the Artist as the ability to draft. He grew drunker, & his conversation became more intimate & confessional.

  ‘SEE ME,’ he at one point confided, ‘LATTER-DAY MEDICI—YOU BOTTICELLI!’

  I briefly smiled, but then I noticed he did not, that his dull eyes seemed to have become incandescent, that this was not a joke, that he was only talking all the more, saying:

  ‘BUT OUR TASK—GREATER—NOT INTERPRETING NATURE FOR DECORATION—SEEKING TO CLASSIFY—TO ORDER NATURE—THEN ONLY RIDDLE REMAINING WILL BE GOD—BUT MAN?—MAN’S DOMINION WILL BE ENTIRELY KNOWN & KNOWABLE, & MAN’S MASTERY COMPLETE—HIS FINAL EMPIRE NATURE—DO YOU UNDERSTAND?—YES? NO? YES—DO YOU?’

  I didn’t. It sounded suspiciously like an attempt by the Surgeon & Mr Cosmo Wheeler to recreate the natural world as a penal colony, with me, the gaoled, now to play the part of turnkey. Still, I had had worse offers.

  ‘Hierarchy?’ offered I.

  ‘ELYSIUM,’ said he.

  As Ackermann’s china plate Billy Blake used say, only by contraries do we advance. But guessing this wasn’t what the Surgeon meant, I was trying to think of something else to say about the Nobility of Science when the Surgeon saved me from answering by pouring me yet another French Martinique rum.

  Brandishing the decanter in front of him like a torch he told me how our work was to begin with my painting one by one all the fish to be found in the inland sea of Macquarie Harbour, all the sea creatures that floated dead along the poisoned waters of the King & Gordon rivers. He had talked to the Commandant, & henceforth I was being taken off all other duties in order to become the Surgeon’s servant.

  My duties would divide into spending half a day cleaning & washing as the Surgeon’s house servant, & the other half-day I was to be absolutely free to concern myself solely with fish, and, more precisely, their painting.

  The Surgeon, now well-primed, stood up & wavered back & forth, a tubby metronome beating a slow sweep between his need for dignity & his desire to present me with a gift. He stumbled & then half-fell, half-collapsed into my lap, bearing as if in offering a wooden box, the size of a large cigar case, inside which were arrayed numerous pots of watercolour paint, some used, a few not—all the colours of a worn-out rainbow—& six brushes, all of them old & tatty.

  Then he slid to the ground, still talking, & I resumed daydreaming of new names & old loves. At some point later in the evening I realised he had been asleep on the floor for at least half an hour & I hadn’t noticed.

  VIII

  IN A BATTERED portmanteau made of dark morocco stowed beneath his bed, the Surgeon kept his several books of natural history, along with a short letter he had received from Jeremy Bentham in answer to a long discourse the Surgeon had written to the great man on how Bentham’s principle of the panopticon—a model prison in which all men could be constantly watched—might profitably be extended to natural history.

  This letter was his most prized possession, talisman of his prospective status as a future fellow of the Royal Society, which, he assured me, was the ultimate imprimatur that could be given a Gentleman & Scientist, & marked one out as a Man of History.

  To tell the whole truth, I must admit at first Billy Gould had no great interest in the fish, & if he could have escaped them, he most surely would have. Searching through the Pudding’s portmanteau he came upon Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae as well as an abridged chapbook edition of Pliny’s Natural History, which the Surgeon dismissed as superstitious claptrap written by an ignorant Roman.

  But I discovered in its pages something more than a mythical bestiary of manticores & basilisks. In Pliny’s observations I discovered that man, far from being central in this life, lived in a parlous world beyond his knowledge, where a pregnant woman might lose her child when a lamp was snuffed in her presence, a world in which man is lost & less but lost & less amidst the marvellous, the extraordinary, the gorgeously inexplicable wonder of a universe only limited by one’s own imagining of it.

  Dr Bowdler-Sharpe’s Book of Eggs on the other hand, nesting at the bottom of the case, was a different matter, altogether more in the spirit of the panopticon. It listed 14,917 different types of eggs produced by 620 different species of bird. Dr Bowdler-Sharpe’s style was economical to the point of brutal obviousness.

  Viz—

  The eggs of the Orthonyx temmincki (Spine-tailed log-runner) are of an elliptical form, moderately glossy, & of a plain white colour. Three eggs measure respectively: 1.07 by .76; 1.13 by .8; 1.17 by .8.

  The Pudding’s tastes, I was coming to realise, could never—no matter how hard I tried—be mine. He was a cracked system lacking only a subject, Dr Bowdler-Sharpe in search of yet one more egg to measure. He wanted to be the ichthyologist, but I would rather have been the fish. His dreams were of capture, mine of escape.

  I would prefer to see a thrush, as I had as a child, feeding in a hard winter on snails, than read such rot as Dr Bowdler-Sharpe; rather watch the thrush smashing the snails against a rock in the midst of a litter of other similarly shattered shells until it can free the meal inside. Much better that than an illustrated inventory of thrush types, defined by claw similarities, by beak differences. Much better to hear the plaintive toot-toot of the nightingale when it is alarmed & see its young chicks freeze stock-still in response, than analyse a collection of stuffed birds in a glass case by radius of head & distance of extended wing tip. Such collecting & classification is all up, as my cobber the madman Clare once remarked, a sort of ambitious fame, & not one worthy of any praise.

  Let me confess at this point, that never have I been so ill-prepared for a task as that of painting the Surgeon’s fish. I felt a momentary & rather dreadful sense of panic. There was, I reasoned to myself in an attempt to calm my nerves, my past as an engraver upon which I could draw. But all I had really got out of that was one more warrant for my arrest under my old name, and—for a short time anywa
y—a blemish-free new name. There was my experience as a colonial painter—a decorator of taprooms & pub signs & occasional portraits—but I knew my limits. My drafting skills, such as they were, were restricted to a crude copying of the details of bank & promissory notes or caricaturing the whims of the lowly & the vanities of the free settlers, all flat objects that can be part traced, part graphed & reproduced through a system of squares, part easily guessed at.

  A fish, on the other hand, is not an easy item to forge.

  A fish is a slippery & three-dimensional monster that exists in all manner of curves, whose colouring & surfaces & translucent fins suggest the very reason & riddle of life. When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.

  But a fish is a truth, & having no idea how to tell a truth, far less paint it, for several days I entirely avoided the issue by burying myself in enormous industry in & around what passed for the Surgeon’s home. As I cleaned & washed & then rebuilt the rotting & decaying parts of the Surgeon’s cottage, as I tidied up his many & varied collections, I returned to my fantasy of becoming a portrait painter for Hobart Town society—a contradiction, I know, I heard the joke a dozen times before I even arrived there—but I fancied faces as rough as theirs with pasts as dirty as theirs deserved someone with as little talent as me to paint them. This wasn’t work for the Academy or the Prado or the Louvre, but for the bastard & idiot issue of the Old World who through theft & terror thought they had a right to rule the New.

  Which, I ought add, they did.

  It’s the only way anyone ever got to rule & I for one didn’t seek to argue with it, only to derive a small living on its fringes. For as Capois Death said, if shit ever becomes valuable, the poor will be born without arseholes. That was our fate, & I didn’t pretend I could alter it, I only wished to survive as best I could, & what else was I to do? I had no desire to become a sawyer or shepherd or whaling deckhand. I didn’t have the hands or back for it, far less the necessary practical skills.

  At the beginning I only wanted to rub along with the whole rotten system, & if that meant making copies of whatever got me through the day—be it bank notes or burghers’ bumfaces—rendered in a way that didn’t draw undue attention to themselves or to me, well so be it.

  My immediate problem was that while my painting skills may have been adequate to misrepresent the gentry, they were not so sufficiently developed that I was convinced I could turn out acceptable paintings like the kelpy at the standard that was obviously expected, & I worried that if I was found to be not what the Pudding had persuaded himself I was, then I might yet end up on the gibbet. And even if I did manage to rise to the job, I was no longer sure I wanted it. I had been seductively promised the position of Botticelli, but in the cold light of a new day it was starting to look suspiciously like taking up the burden of Bowdler-Sharpe.

  If I could have found a more comfortable & less dangerous billet I would have gladly taken it. But there were no other options & I had no choice but to concentrate my mind on the matter of how I might come up with a passable rendering of a fish.

  When the Surgeon went out to supervise a flogging, or to the muster to deny all the sick & dying on the chain gangs time off or entry to the hospital, & I was sure I was safe, I would fetch the portmanteau & carefully examine the method & style used in the various volumes to illustrate plants & animals. The best of them showed a certain spontaneity that I knew I could never approach, but the worst of them were as flat & dead as their subjects must have been when studied, & I flattered myself I could do no worse.

  But then I would go down to the fishermen’s jetty & look at the fish that had been netted that day, along with the occasional bloated convict drowned trying to escape, & my heart would again fill with dread, for the flopping, flapping masses of fins & scales seemed entirely beyond me.

  The one talent I fancied I had in art—of capturing a certain crude likeness of character in cartoons of people’s faces—I indulged myself in of an evening with charcoal on the sandstone wall of the Penitentiary. Here we all slept in lice-flecked hammocks up & down a long dreary barrack.

  And here, on the evening of my seventh day as the Surgeon’s servant, when, for the amusement of my fellow villains, I was sketching a crude caricature of the Surgeon naked, the most astonishing thing happened.

  The Surgeon grew a dorsal fin.

  I halted for a moment, a little shocked.

  Someone smirked.

  Capois Death laughed.

  I resumed my task momentarily, resketching his eyes as big mournful orbs behind which a gill began sprouting. Then a bulbous scaled body grew outwards from behind the eyes, the over-inflated entirety of which I covered in wild slash strokes to resemble small spikes, & at the end of this prickly football a tail could be seen protruding.

  IX

  THE NEXT MORNING I collected a live specimen from the fishing gang, spent only a cursory time cleaning the cottage, & then moved the small round mahogany table to take advantage of what morning light made it through the single window, took out the paintbox & set to work.

  The day passed fitfully, the sun swung around, & in the afternoon the early winter rain began, scratchy & volatile, but I was much too absorbed to pay it any heed. I made several preliminary sketches, all on the same piece of paper, then wasted two perfectly fresh pieces on paintings that I botched at one point or another, the first by accident when I knocked a small bottle of Indian ink over the table, the second when I simply failed to get the proportion of the tail right because of my desire to make the picture as lifelike as possible.

  But my third attempt pleased me—oh, it was no work of genius, I’ll grant you—but in the slightly fearful, slightly bellicose uplift of the eye’s large pupil I could feel the sudden excitement of being the angler & him being unexpectedly hooked. In the exaggerated prominence of the forehead in which he took such pride (the reservoir of genius, he had the day before confided to me, tapping at the top of his scone) I could feel his thrashing weight seeking to escape, & so I let my line run out a little in the downturned fleshy mouth, speaking of a certain unconcealable bitterness & a sensuality that was transformed into a surly, oppressive physical presence. But then I pulled back & oh! oh!—Oh I knew I now had him, yes, that was most surely him, & oh the bloated body & oh the ridiculous display of prickles & oh the ludicrously small tail at the end of the balloon of the flesh as he finally broke water & became visible. A current of joy passed through me because now I really had him, finally caught for all to see.

  That evening, when the Surgeon returned, I presented him with my first picture.

  The Surgeon held the painting out at full arm’s length, looked out of his absurd large doe-dark eyes & down his flat fat nose at it, &, in the manner to which I had now grown accustomed, began a lengthy discourse on the defensive nature of the porcupine fish, how it blew itself up to triple its size, spikes bristling, to intimidate other fish. All the while he talked, he kept fiddling with the picture, holding it out, bringing it in close, laying it on the table, picking it back up & staring at it yet again with his arms fully extended.

  Finally he declared it passably well done.

  And then he was called away to attend a hanging, leaving me & the porcupine fish alone together in the late evening light.

  I took a knife down from where it hung on the side of the fireplace, & placed the sharp tip against the taut body of the porcupine fish. Then I pushed.

  The flesh compressed but little, then with a sudden rush of air its skin tore, & the fish deflated with the abrupt hiss of a burst bladder.

  On the table there now lay a fish entirely different from the prickly monstrous form I had painted, a tiny minnow with large eyes that accused me of not understanding its need for posture, a minnow with flaccid skin & a large knife stuck through it.

  I knew there would be no instruction to paint it again, that even the chain gang would not barter for such poisonous flesh. I threw it o
n the fire, where it draped around a slow smouldering log like one more collapsed soul.

  THE STARGAZER

  On the pus of whelks—Moonbirds, their returning—Premonitions of doom—Rise of the Commandant—His seizure of power—The question of nations—Miss Anne, her subtle influence—The invention of Europe—The sale of Australia—Rolo Palma, treating of his talking with angels—Musha Pug—His hatred of catamites—Railway fever.

  I

  POBJOY, WELL PLEASED with his last Constable, has returned with some sea urchins for me to eat. It is a small reward, & not much of a meal, but one more important to me than Pobjoy can imagine. I scoop the roe out with my fingers, although in truth it is not for this small salty pleasure that I covet the sea urchin, but for the bright purple spikes with which its shell is armoured like a lurid aquatic echidna. On a low-tide early evening I snap the spikes off their shell, take two of the many small beach stones that form the floor of the cell and, grinding the spikes between the stones, make a purple powder.

  Next, I swirl this powder with spittle & fat, saved from the occasional rancid gob of pickled pork, in the smooth grooved palm of the scallop shell that serves as my ink pot. In this way I make my ink, watching the purple whirling in the white shell, while thinking of how purple, the colour of emperors, seems appropriate for the next part of my tale, which is of how my fortunes became inextricably entangled with those of a Caesar of the south seas, whom none will remember & who was tormented by premonitions of the ravages he knew time would inflict upon his achievements.

  The King, I suspect, deems it strange that I will spend some pages talking about the Commandant, but his story is mine & mine his, for his dreams determined my destiny. I tell the King that he cannot begin to understand the perversity of my fate if he does not fully appreciate how the Commandant finally created not one but two alternate hells. The second, which I was only to discover much later—too late as it transpired—was the one that truly terrified me in its immortal aspirations. But the utter perversity of his achievement can only be understood by those who know the full, true & terrible story of the Commandant. Our destinies were soon to meld, however much neither of us would have wished it.