Gould's Book of Fish

Richard Flanagan

As for me, they have taken the book and everything away now, and what are books anyway but unreliable fairy tales?

While such detail tallied with the life described in the Book of Fish, the historical Gould’s subsequent convict record suggests a life entirely at odds with that which had so captivated me. It sometimes seemed as if the author of the Book of Fish, the storyteller William Buelow Gould, had been born with a memory but neither experience nor history to account for it, and had spent forever after seeking to invent what didn’t exist in the curious belief that his imagination might become his experience, and thereby both explain and cure his problem of an inconsolable memory.

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.

Do you think I was only gaoled? I wished to cry out as she turned to leave & rapped thrice on the door for Pobjoy to come & open—for I too was the gaoler. Do you think to keep my own hide unflogged I never lied? Never stole off a mate? I have a weakness for blue gin, old women, white rum, young girls, porter, pisco, human company & the Commandant’s laudanum. I have a great fear of pain. I am beyond shame. Do you think I never informed on a mate? I was both cobber & dobber, I liked them & wept for them when they took them off to be flogged on my false information. I survived. It was bad & wrong & I may as well be the cat-o’-nine tails stripping bark off their backs when I traded souls for some scraps of food or paint. I gave away all I needed. I was a vile piece of cell-shit. I smelt the breath of my fellows. I tasted the sour stench of their rotten lives. I was the stinking cockroach. I was the filthy lice that didn’t stop itching. I was Australia. I was dying before I was born. I was a rat eating its young. I was Mary Magdalene. I was Jesus. I was sinner. I was saint. I was flesh & flesh’s appetite & flesh’s union & death & love were all equally rank & all equally beautiful in my eyes. I cradled their broken bodies dying. I kissed their suppurating boils. I washed their skinny shanks filled with ulcers, rotting craters of pus; I was that pus & I was spirit & I was God & I was untranslatable & unknowable even to myself. How I hated myself for it. How I wished to essay the universe I loved which was me also & how I wanted to know why it was that in my dreams I flew through oceans & why when I awoke I was the earth smelling of freshly turned peat. No man could answer me my angry lamentations nor could they hear my jokes why I had to suffer this life. I was God & I was pus & whatever was me was You & You were Holy, Your feet, Your bowels, Your mound, Your armpits, Your smell & Your sound & taste, Your fallen Beauty, I was Divine in Your image & I was You & I was no longer long for this grand earth & why is it no words would tell how I was so much hurting aching bidding farewell?

Stories as written are progressive, sentence must build upon sentence as brick upon brick, yet the beauty of this life in its endless mystery is circular. Sun & moon, spheres endlessly circling. Black man, full circle; white man, bisected circle; life, the third circle, on & on, & round & round.

Sometimes I even want to tap with my long snout on those divers’ goggles & say: You want to know what this country will become? Ask me—after all, if you can’t trust a liar & a forger, a whore & an informer, a convicted murderer & a thief, you’ll never understand this country. Because we all make our accommodations with power, & the mass of us would sell our brother or sister for a bit of peace & quiet. We’ve been trained to live a life of moral cowardice while all the time comforting ourselves that we are nature’s rebels. But in truth we’ve never got upset & excited about anything; we’re like the sheet we shot the Aborigines to make way for, docile until slaughter.

There is no such thing as non-fiction. It is not a coincidence that histories are written. That would seem to make all history a piece of writing, books, stories, fiction. There is the notion that fiction exists and so does non-fiction. But did it ever occur to you that this is a curious way to talk about made-up stories? There is truth and there is un-truth but there is not lie and un-lie. There is reality and unreality, but there is not imagination and non-imagination.
Generally, invented things are defined in negative terms while things that are true are defined in positive terms. So you can't have un-dream or non-dream, this is reality, but something can be unreal, this is dream. But the situation is reversed when it comes to writing. There is fiction and non-fiction and though we are taught that fiction is not real and non-fiction is, neither is quite so much either.
So what about history? What about these non-fiction books that are sold as histories? Was Heroditus a writer of fiction or non-fiction? Was Ovid? What about Homer? Works that clearly include events which could not have happened do seem to be less than non-fiction, or would the term be more than?
Pretty invented stories. Unreliable fairytales. Artificially constructed dreams. The lies of poets.
Think through these terms. There is so much more than fiction and non-fiction going on in them. Stating the obvious they plunge us into a world where stories are more like realities than not. Think on the truth of fiction for a while; it will do you more good than all the non-fiction in the world (remember: there isn't any).