"Gould's Book of Fish" by Richard Flanagan (2001)

"I had begun with the comforting conclusion that books are the tongue of divine wisdom, and had ended only with the thin hunch that all books are grand follies, destined forever to be misunderstood."

This is the second of Richard Flanagan's books to be reviewed here.  I read/reviewed The Narrow Road to the Deep North last month. 

Published 12 years before The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Gould's Book of Fish is much more lyrical in tone.  It begins with the discovery of Gould's book in a junk shop, from there moves to a mythical history of Tasmania, and ends with the kind of tragedy that the Greeks were famous for.

And if you liked The Narrow Road to the Deep North, I can guarantee that you'll love Gould's Book of Fish.  It's everything that The Narrow Road is and more: the doomed infrastructure project, the fire near the end, and the tragedy of human suffering painted against the paradoxical/beautiful nature of our existence.  It's all here, but Gould's Book of Fish does a far better job of covering similar territory in a different century.  It's sad and whimsical, and when the various story threads come together it's truly something to behold.

If I have a complaint about this book, it's that it moves a bit slowly, but then again the slow parts help build up momentum for the big finish.  Even the greatest novels are slow at times, and it is often the case that these "slow" bits give to the novel a weight it wouldn't otherwise have.  A great book should feel like a journey, right down to the parts where your legs get tired, and you wonder when you'll finally get there.

I have the feeling that The Narrow Road to the Deep North was much better received than Gould's Book of Fish, but I also think that it will be for his book of fish that Richard Flanagan is best remembered.  The Narrow Road to the Deep North might be a triumph of research, but Gould's Book of Fish was both a labor of love and a truly original work of fiction.

"The Narrow Road to the Deep North" by Richard Flanagan (2013)

"He thought of how the world organises its affairs so that civilisation every day commits crimes for which any individual would be imprisoned for life.  And how people accept this either by ignoring it and calling it current affairs or politics or wars, or by making a space that has nothing to do with civilisation and calling that space their private life.  And the more in that private live they break with civilisation, the more that private life becomes a secret life, the freer they feel.  But it is not so.  You are never free of the world; to share life is to share guilt."

Richard Flanagan is an Australian writer and director.  He has written six novels and five works of non-fiction.  He co-wrote Baz Luhrmann's 2008 movie Australia, and received the Man Booker Prize in 2014.

His 2013 novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North details the life and times of Dorrigo Evans, an Australian surgeon deeply scarred by his experiences in a Burmese prison camp under the Japanese.  The novel is roughly chronological, jumping from his earliest years in Tasmania, to his hellish years in Burma, to his rise to fame and fortune in post-WWII Australia.

And I must say that the the scenes in the concentration camp are among the best fiction I've read about the Second World War.  They are harrowing, and a few Google searches only proved that yes, things like this actually happened.

The only problem is that the book doesn't quite hang together as a whole, and some of the sections set outside Burma detract from the masterful sections set within it.  Structurally, I admire what Richard Flanagan was trying to do, but the "love triangle" elements set in Australia don't seem to belong alongside the brutal accounts of life inside a Japanese prison camp.  

Yes, setting the entire book inside the prison camp might have made it too similar to other novels, but most of the framing narrative set outside of the camp calls too much of the prisoners' suffering under the Japanese into question.  The chapters set in postwar Japan are excellent, but the remainder of the book feels like an inferior, unfinished novel, fused into what should have been a more straightforward book on the Australian experience during WWII.

This said, I think that where this book truly shines is in its depiction of East vs. West.  The Japanese characters in this novel are all given their due, and at times the ways in which their philosophy clashes with Western ideas of warfare makes for fascinating reading.

I wouldn't say that The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a flawless book, but it's definitely one of the best books I've read in a while.  Not as honed as The Orenda which preceded it, but a solid effort nevertheless.  I'll be looking out for more of Richard Flanagan's books in the future.