WHAT MAKES a great novel? Is it the sustained narrative drive or expertly painted characters that keep the pages turning? Sometimes the pleasure comes from reading itself; the interplay of words and imagination, and it is into this category that Gould’s Book of Fish falls.

In the age of the digestible soundbite, ambitious books are usually dismissed as pretentious nonsense, and there are many who have written off this novel. But there are others who have found it inspired.

Diving into the cruelty, humiliation and collective insanity that drive Flanagan’s Tasmanian penal colony demands brave reading. Confinement, torture and execution are the order of each day and the names that populate its pages (Pobjoy, Capois Death, Musha Pug) hint at the characters’ brutalised lives.

Only Flanagan’s magical ability to excite the imagination and stretch the mind of the reader can save the book from its subject. Sentences of complex syntax glow with hallucinatory intensity, but this is more than just linguistic pyrotechnics. With his maelstrom of letters Flanagan explores the effects of power, both on the tyrant that wields it and on the subjugated, in an attempt to reconcile beauty with brutality.

So take a chance, read the book and decide for yourself. As Gould points out: “At best a picture, a book are only open doors inviting you into an empty house, & once inside you just have to make the rest up as well as you can.”

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