The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

What emerges, through the murky depths, is the love story of Gould’s affair with Twopenny Sal, an indigenous woman who is held as the mistress of the Commandant. The sections each begin with one of the fish Gould studied, and they start to resemble, or perhaps become, human characters in his life, the most memorable of whom is the sadistic, syphilitic Commandant, whose “folly was to think you could turn a penal colony into a nation.” That survey is Flanagan’s organizing principle. He is William Buelow Gould, a convict-artist who was transported to the prison island in the early nineteenth century and forced by the colony’s surgeon to paint local fish as part of a scientific survey. “Gould,” which is really a book about how history is told and transmitted, is set predominantly in Tasmania’s colonial era and centers on a prisoner referred to by his jailers only as a number. That sense of unreality pervades “Gould’s Book of Fish” (2001), Flanagan’s third novel and first masterpiece it’s a work of magical realism, reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez with its shape-shifting, anthropomorphic characters and time-travelling narrative. In a piece for this magazine in 2013, Flanagan described Tasmania, where he still lives, as an “island Wunderkammer, crammed full of the exotic and the strange, the beautiful and the cruel, conducive not to notions of progress but to a sense of unreality.” More than mere biographical detail, this remote island and its troubled, often violent history is one of his obsessions. Richard Flanagan, who yesterday became the third Australian to win the Booker Prize, for his novel “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” was born in Tasmania.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan