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

by Richard Flanagan

  In spite of his epic nation-building projects, the Commandant grew depressed at the way trade seemed to have dropped off to next to nothing, the insolent manner his creditors pressed ever more urgently for repayment, & his own inability to find a solution to his growing debt.

  Not long after the Japanese sawyers, unperturbed, had set off in the direction of Frenchman’s Cap never to return, but some time before the boulder desert turned to button grass & the forest drifted back, stories began to surface of how the Commandant had conceived of a remarkable project for which there was no precedent on any continent. Though rumours of the Japanese sawyers succumbing to an incurable melancholia & then floating away continued for some years after, what quickly came to dominate nearly all talk—other than that of Matt Brady—was the Commandant’s grandest idea of all, that of the Great Mah-Jong Hall.

  III

  AFTER THE FAILURE of the National Sarah Island Railway Station to attract any travelling locomotives, the Commandant became convinced that this building would finally generate the money he needed to become a truly great power. It would attract Javanese & Chinese traders, Moluccan pirates & Dutch merchants, English sailors & French scientists, all searching for a place in the South Seas to gamble their hard-won fortunes. Wrote he lengthy letters to Miss Anne asking questions as to the numerous forms the gaming tables of London took, the latest fashions in architecture & interior decoration.

  Then he called for Capois Death.

  The publican was ordered to design a building combining the wonder of Versailles with the cruder pleasures afforded by the Five Courts bear-baiting pit. Inspired though he was only by what he had seen—seashells & silk sails & the parabolic etching of the night sky glimpsed whilst lying with the Siamese girls beneath the manfern fronds—Capois Death was in terror of the normal sort of parasites he had found around the Commandant. Ever ready to do their master a favour & their rivals a disservice, all of them professed a love of the Commandant’s stated ambition to outdo Europe by rebuilding it. They praised the plaster busts of Cicero that began to arrive even before the plans were complete, wrote sonnets in imitation of styles long dead & succeeded in creating Art that was a death mask of fashions buried everywhere else.

  Accordingly Capois Death went to great pains to describe his first set of plans as being in the Egyptian revival style with some rococo elements. To the Commandant they looked suspiciously like six iron-ribbed, glass-paned domes above which sat a giant gilded scallop shell held up by some ornate columns from which flew silk sails tied down to a great bowsprit.

  Whatever doubts the Commandant may have had were, however, suppressed by his acolytes’ polite applause for the plans & his own delight in seeing the way even a building as ambitious & large as this would in turn be dwarfed by a statue of himself, so high that his head would always be in the clouds, so massive that just his single finger—forever pointing north towards Miss Anne’s Europe—was to be ten yards long. He heard no derisory comments about the big scallop, recognised only the admiration & necessary backing & loans of the Javanese traders & the Chinese merchants, as long as various sureties were made & signed for.

  The Commandant’s predilection was for strict symmetry followed by adornment, both of which suffered in consequence of his desire to have the building the embodiment of his desire. No plan could proceed without his signature, & when Capois Death later submitted three alternative drawings for the design of the six domes, the Commandant in a moment of inattentive weariness appended his signature to all three, & in consequence eighteen domes, all of varying shapes & materials, were built by his fearful underlings.

  The scale of such a building was staggering, its construction a nightmare of suffering for all who worked upon it, the hundreds who died in its construction, the thousands who were maimed & crippled in the forging of the iron, the cutting & carrying of the timber, the quarrying of the stone, the masonry, the carpentry. Yet it was a nightmare of such stupendous proportions that it was impossible not to feel a perverse astonishment at what was being raised in the middle of that wilderness.

  Long after he had forgotten why they were to him so important, his endless believing in Miss Anne’s missives led the Commandant to call for Capois Death.

  ‘I have in mind,’ the Commandant told the publican - architect, ‘the most magnificent decoration conceivable: the replication of Miss Anne’s letters in huge gilt script around the walls of the Great Mah-Jong Hall.’ Capois Death twisted his head so his gaze would be directed at the ceiling & not at the Commandant. ‘The painting of these Sacred Words,’ continued the Commandant, his high voice rising to the point of near inaudibility as it sought to capitalise important words—‘was the Greatest Honour Conceivable, demanding a religious belief in the sanctity of the Nation’s Noble Mission.’

  As Capois Death listened to the Commandant’s forceful, forgettable, falsetto words, he was reminded of the sound of a stream of piss hitting sand. He lowered his eyes to meet those of the Commandant’s. He assured him he knew just the man for the job.

  IV

  MY BOWELS ARE buggered now, & have in a moment of great need betrayed me. Back then my bowels still voided rather than irrigated, before me I had a fine future as a National Artist & beneath me I had sturdy stools to deploy defensively as necessary. Now my guts clench tighter than the dying machine breaker’s gob, I fear the lousy fish I paint, I have been shitting through the eye of a needle for the last four days, & today I did not have a single solid turd to toss at Pobjoy when he visited.

  On & on he went, all about his new passion, Art, in which he sees me as something of a guide & something of a rival & something of an impostor, & me defenceless. He seemed impervious to the acrid stench of my quarters, my groans, far less the watery arguments I was cheerfully contriving out of every orifice in the forlorn hope he might leave.

  As Pobjoy took some pleasure in pointing out to me, definitions belonged to the definer, not the defined. Now I realise it is an idea that would appeal greatly to the King in his dialogue with Heaven, but when I mention it the King rolls his body slightly which is his way of showing utter contempt for an opinion other than his own.

  Look at Lycett, continued Pobjoy, his lithographs of Van Diemen’s Land were made without ever feeling the burden of having to visit the island & proved such a success in London, they show that the less Art can have to do with the real world, the more successful it will be.

  I can offer no argument—after all, what, other than Pobjoy’s pottage, have my fish ever won me? I just tried to get him to leave as quickly as possible so that I might get back to my work. From his alpine heights Pobjoy produced a chart of the island of Van Diemen’s Land to further prove his argument, & asked what its shape reminds me of?

  Pobjoy was a man who could not look at a knot of wood without getting overexcited & undoubtedly he wanted me to say its triangular form resembled that of a woman’s wonder, & said I so. Pobjoy reacted like it was a turd not a word I had thrown, leapt upon me & began thrashing me. I thanked him for that also, as it meant he would shortly be leaving. ‘You idiot!’ yelled Pobjoy as he dropped me to the floor with a sledgehammer right. ‘It’s a mask Van Diemen’s Land looks like, a damn mask!’

  As I curled up like a dying fish beneath his flailing boots, I managed to stay his assault long enough to tell him that I had only ever seen myself as his most loyal servant & had no desire to displease him. I further put it that those above should never underestimate the desire of those below to do the right thing. I recounted how when I worked at Palmer the coachbuilders, Old Man Palmer—who was given to strong expression—made it clear in his home that he had no truck with the savages.

  One of his trusted convict servants used borrow his horse to go out shooting kangaroo. Old Man Palmer complained to the servant that he was using an excessive amount of powder & shot just for hunting. The servant objected that he needed that much to kill blackfellas. Old Man Palmer dismissed this as vainglorious nonsense & boasting. Some time later Old Man P
almer had to take his horse as soon as the servant returned from one of his hunting forays. Upon halting at a creek, he reached into his saddlebag for his pannikin to fetch a drink, but instead pulled out a black child’s head & three flyblown black hands. On returning home, he fronted his servant about this grisly discovery. The servant replied, ‘Now, Master, understand that I only ever seek to please you & that I do not tell lies.’

  Pobjoy had collapsed in a corner shaking his head in complete dejection, looking like Saint Aloysius who on hearing a man break wind burst into tears & sought solace in prayers.

  ‘So you see,’ I told Pobjoy, ‘servants are to be trusted in the sincerity of what they say.’ And with that Pobjoy arose in a complete fury & gave me a hiding the likes of which I had not experienced for some long time. ‘Are you a complete moron, Gould?’ Pobjoy was shouting. ‘Yes, absolutely,’ I replied, though it was less than easy to get all the words out with Pobjoy’s fist & boot clattering around my teeth. ‘I would most respectfully have to say that I am.’

  As my body slid along the cell floor with his kicks, as his heaving boot snapped my head back & forth like I was disagreeing with him when all the time I was only trying to tell him for both our sakes what he wanted to hear, I felt my mind unhinging & floating back to when I once spent my days serenely painting Miss Anne’s stories of Europe on the walls of the Great Mah-Jong Hall.

  V

  AT FIRST, IN the misty, damp confines of the rising building, I pencilled in the letters on the already painted walls. Then, with the Commandant’s aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Lethborg—who supplied me with the carefully selected gobbets of Miss Anne’s letters—supervising to ensure no theft took place, I gilded the words with the finest gold leaf.

  Later, when the hall began to run into problems of finance, I painted Miss Anne’s words straight onto the wet plaster, unsupervised & ungilded, all her descriptions of the new miracles of mechanickal steam & unfettered poesy. It was as if the Commandant wished both to extol these wonders & yet prove by their very capture in the Great Mah-Jong Hall that he had escaped them by imprisoning all those words between the papier-mâché elephants of Hannibal & the authentic plaster-of-Paris busts of Cicero & Homer & Virgil—as if honour was the cruellest & subtlest form of mockery.

  When Miss Anne’s letters proved thin material, Lieutenant Lethborg ordered Jorgen Jorgensen to invent more grandiose tales. For the first—though not the last—time, I began to have a glimmer of Jorgensen’s capacity for invention. He invented conversations between Miss Anne & the greatest minds of Europe: with Goethe & Mickiewicz & Pushkin, the latter supposedly penning the following ode in honour of Miss Anne’s brother’s achievements:

  Here we are destined by nature

  To cut a window into Europe;

  And to gain a foothold by the sea.

  I put that in large red letters in the banquet room, just in case anyone was unsure as to its meaning, for unlike the fish the whole affair seemed in desperate need of underlining.

  The Commandant, who noticed this verse on an inspection tour the following day, was said to be so moved that a tear erupted out of an eye socket of the gold mask & trickled amber down its glowing side.

  Goethe’s verse, on the other hand, apparently written in the heat of what we all knew to be a passion conceived whilst on a short vacation in London, a passion that we knew could never be consummated with the ever-chaste Miss Anne, I painted in a purple italic across the mirror that spanned the far wall of the ladies’ washroom, above a long teak vanity table that had been a gift of the Javanese traders:

  All transient things

  Are only a parable;

  The inaccessible

  Here becomes reality

  Here the ineffable is achieved;

  The Eternal Feminine

  Draws us on.

  The less esoteric sentiments & stories of how an aside by Miss Anne upon the power of mists had inspired Nasmyth’s steam hammer I put in the corridors, along with her European anecdotes about the violinist Paganini rethinking his practice of fingering after an evening in her divine company, of how when flying over Strasbourg in a balloon with the Montgolfier brothers, the earthbound Malus glimpsed her through his telescope & was struck with his great revelation about the polarisation of light.

  It was hard work, more physical than you might suspect, but the days never seemed as long as they had with those stinking fish. The months divided into so many letters, the days into so many words, & Billy Gould’s mind was free, unlike with the fish who he already sensed had designs on him. In so far as one could be happy imprisoned on an island, he ought to have been. But his mind kept returning to Twopenny Sal.

  He made friends, impressed others with his thoughtful industry. He brought to his lettering both his brief experience painting livery for Palmer the coachbuilder & a modest but genuine creative deftness: some he did in block Roman, others in a looping Italianate; great descriptions he gave a quality almost sculptural, while intriguing maxims were surrounded by expanses of space into which their meaning might grow. He showed appropriate deference, saying that his work was easy when given material as magnificent as Miss Anne’s writings. But in truth when he painted a word or a sentence particularly beautifully, it was not in honour of Miss Anne, but another.

  When there were no more walls to paint, all this industry & toadying paid off. Through Lieutenant Lethborg I was told that the Commandant, delighted with my work, had ordered that I was now to paint a series of portraits of him in various historical poses. In the meantime, if I didn’t mind, I was to knock up a few copies of Rubens from a book of etchings.

  During this time the fortunes of the island changed. The endless river of money that had once flooded into the settlement dried up. The Commandant was forced to sell whatever he could, including a priceless collection of Rubens, to meet his ever greater debts with the Chinese pirates & Javanese usurers who had financed the hall’s construction.

  When finally the Great Mah-Jong Hall opened the island rejoiced, but no-one came to pay to play mah-jong. Though it was incomprehensible to everyone on Sarah Island that people might not wish to travel halfway across the globe to lose money in this wonder of the New World, still no-one came. A chill wind blew through its reception halls, stately rooms & ornate gaming rooms with ceilings so high that clouds gathered there, & there was nobody to marvel with us at how so much could mean so little.

  The Great Mah-Jong Hall sat empty. The black children for whom Twopenny Sal cared were left to run through its echoing ballrooms & banqueting halls, chasing birds & playing games of hide and seek in its growing decrepitude.

  In the encroaching rising damp & descending mists that now pervaded its interior, Miss Anne’s letters grew bedraggled & her words began washing away. Within a short time those wet tales of the wonder & glory of Europe with which I had adorned so many walls were flecked, then covered with the refuse of rainbow-hued rosellas & harsh crying yellow-tailed black cockatoos that took to flying in flocks through the vast emptiness.

  In the rain that now fell inside, Miss Anne’s observations on the illumination of Pall Mall by gas light & her pivotal role in Count von Rumford’s treatise on communal kitchens began running into her descriptions of the steam press & mesmeric healing, & all were soon encased in a hardening shell of more bird dung. As sea eagles spiralled far above, swifts began nesting above Miss Anne’s lyrical reports on macadamised roads. While bats blurred her observations on the invention of the electric telegraph, a mob of sulphur-crested cockatoos took roost above her inspiration of Wordsworth’s latest rewriting of The Prelude (done in best Grasmere blue), & in the manured waste that gathered below a small rainforest began growing. In such a fecund catastrophe of decay everything became muddled & then one & all of it was covered in more & more stinking, encrusting lice & maggot-crawling crap.

  Down all those inscriptions sacred to European ingenuity & European thought & the European genius of progress, stalactites of white & green droppings grew daily l
onger. Then the shit mounting on the floor began ascending like the wondrous voices of a choir of castrati into the exquisite European cornices, & shit was to be seen tumbling like eloquent Augustinian arguments out of the charming European gargoyles. Shit erupted like Vesuvius out of the great European windows, shit flowed like the mighty Danube out the grand European doors, & in the end the Commandant sold the whole sorry mess of shit-encrusted Europe as guano to the Peruvians who paid for it with several crates of bad pisco—a sweet, savage liquor popular with the whalers—& had it shipped back to their own country to there grow corn from.

  VI

  THE COMMANDANT CEASED his travels around the Great Sarah Island Railway Line, rarely went to his palace, & now spent not only most of his days but all of his nights in his solitary confinement cell. He would sometimes imprison one or another of his close advisers in the cell next to him for a few days, so that they might better understand the Commandant’s ultimate goal of a city where every man could be trusted to be his own gaoler, living in perfect isolation from every other man.

  The old Dane—with whom the Commandant now spent much of his time, dictating reports, letters & what we thought was the necessary administrative minutiae of running a rising nation—once told Capois Death that the Commandant in the course of a long game of cribbage had sighed that a great city is a great solitude. I long suspected that embedded in this comment was his true motivation for first turning the prison island into a city, & then, later, the city into a larger, more complete gaol.