The narrator of ''Gould's Book of Fish'' ends his tale having become his subject matter and ''knowing that a scam is just a dream, & that a dream is a dangerous thing if you believe in it too much.'' Richard Flanagan is a Tasmanian writer who has confronted dreams, heedless of danger, and been much rewarded in his home region for having done so. His first novel, ''Death of a River Guide'' (1994), was narrated by a drowning man, Aljaz, who had been ''granted visions -- grand, great, wild, sweeping visions.'' Over 300 pages of antipodean magic realism followed, while Aljaz submitted to the river. Flanagan's next novel, ''The Sound of One Hand Clapping'' (1997), resorted to naturalism, albeit of a sort that allowed the story to be told in chopped-up time. With his new book, the author has turned back to his earlier recipe -- one part Rabelais, one part García Márquez, one part Ned Kelly -- to ''wild, sweeping visions'' and to water.
The hero of ''Gould's Book of Fish'' is based on a historical figure, William Buelow Gould, an English convict and painter who drowned in 1831 while trying to escape from Sarah Island, a penal colony off Tasmania. The original ''Book of Fish'' is Gould's taxonomy of the fish caught locally, which is now housed in the State Library of Tasmania. In an audacious effort at postcolonial recovery, Flanagan has adopted the existing plates and other fragments of Gould's work and attempted to imagine a history of ''an island in the middle of a wilderness far off the coast of a nowhere land so blighted it existed only as a gaol.'' Flanagan's version is outspoken on many unspeakable stories, like the aboriginal genocide. It undercuts the history dictated by judges and jailers, and in order to escape the invidious rationalism of its era it deploys a method whereby, as his publisher said of Flanagan's first novel, ''dreaming reasserts its power over thinking.''
The basic situation of Billy Gould, convicted murderer, thief and forger, is confinement to a cliffside cage, in which seawater washes up to his neck when the tide rolls in. ''I count my blessings as I float,'' he writes; ''this twice-daily bath lately seems to have rid me of my lice.'' His jailer, Pobjoy, beats him regularly and receives in return the prisoner's weapon, feces. Unsurprisingly for a man in such dire straits, Gould's speech is correspondingly scatological. When he puts paint to paper, however, he is a genius. As if things weren't bad enough, Gould is surrounded by people on the convict island who are half-mad and bent on oppressing him: the Commandant; the surgeon, Lempriere; Pobjoy himself. There is also a black British convict named Capois Death and an aboriginal woman, Twopenny Sal, who may have borne Gould's child. Larger than life though they all are, none has much force as a fictional character, a deficiency apparently justified by the novel's final trick, revealed in an afterword.
Flanagan has a terrific narrative energy, and he reaches for ''the marvelous, the extraordinary, the gorgeously inexplicable wonder of a universe only limited by one's own imagining of it.'' The disadvantage for the reader, in a novel of phantasmagoric happenings, is that these are apt to take the place of mundane but engaging devices like plot, dialogue, character. ''Gould's Book of Fish'' has no plot and next to no dialogue of the ordinary kind, and Gould, for all his talent, has no human personality. A typical anecdote is the one in which we learn how he was sent to the penal colony: ''In that courtroom there was a lot of dark wood trying to take itself seriously. In order to lighten all that sorry timber up I should have told it the story I am telling you now, of how life is best appreciated as a joke when you discover all Heaven & all Hell are implicit in the most insignificant: a soiled sheet, a kangaroo hunt, the eyes of a fish.''
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