Applause or catcalls? You be the judge

This was published 18 years ago

Applause or catcalls? You be the judge

What has Richard Flanagan done? Has he written "a masterpiece" or "a monstrosity of a book"? Should we give him a standing ovation, a round of catcalls or a patronising pat on the back and a gentle hint to do better next time? It all depends which critic you read.

Gould's Book of Fish, his third novel, has just been released in Britain and the US. This surreal take on colonial Tasmania has scored a rapturous review from the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani, a critic who is notoriously hard to please. According to Kakutani, this is "an enthralling story", a "remarkable" and "astonishing" book, "a wondrous, phantasmagorical meditation on art and history and nature". Comparisons - entirely favourable - are made to Sterne, Marquez, Joyce, Melville. The reader is left with "not only a visceral understanding of the cruelties and corruptions perpetrated by the human race, but also an appreciation of its glories and perseverance, its ability to alchemize suffering into art". This is the kind of review that every author dreams of.


Can this really be the same book that Peter Craven reviewed in The Age last November? Apart from its length and high seriousness, this was the kind of review that is every author's nightmare.

Gould's Book of Fish, we were told then, was "a monstrosity of a book. I cannot believe that a novel like this has been put before the public with such a mishmash of verbal collisions, such lapses of judgment and such evasions of pace".

Craven lambasted the novel for failing to dramatise scenes or master its plot. He found "the prose slurps and slops its way through a thousand mismanaged effects", creating "a kind of pastiche" that "falls flat on its belly time after time". He liked the first chapter (he had published an earlier version of it in his own anthology, The Best Australian Stories 1999) and conceded that the book had imagination and potential brilliance; but all it amounted to was "a magnificent skeleton asking to be made flesh".

The temptation is to put this extreme difference of opinion down to yet another bout of tall poppy-lopping. We attack our own with special ferocity, goes the argument: we can't or won't see the genius that is left to the more informed and discerning critics overseas to discover. Complaints over the years from every author from Patrick White to Peter Carey to Bryce Courtenay have bolstered the image of the Australian writer as a prophet without honour in his own country.

There are two problems with this argument. One is that it's another form of cultural cringe in itself: it assumes that a New York-based reviewer is necessarily a better judge than a Melbourne-based reviewer. The other problem is that in most cases, it isn't true.

All right, I can't prove that. But about three years ago, I tested the argument by collecting and analysing reviews of three prominent Australian books (Murray Bail's Eucalyptus, Delia Falconer's The Service of Clouds, Dorothy Porter's The Monkey's Mask). There was absolutely no discernible difference between reviews in Australia and reviews in Britain and the US. The differences between reviews were the kind you could put down to individual taste, or the need to provide services to different kinds of readers, rather than to any entrenched cultural bias for or against Australian books.

Anecdotal evidence, moreover, suggests that if anything, we're not hard enough on our own product. Perhaps because we're a small culture where writers and reviewers often know each other, there's a tendency to pull back and not pass tough judgments. In that context, Craven has to be applauded for saying exactly what he thinks.

But where does this leave Gould's Book of Fish? Who was right, Craven or Kakutani? It's still early days, but so far, the verdict is running way out in Flanagan's favour: most Australian critics loved the book, the Christian Science Monitor calls it "the slipperiest, most outrageous novel of the year" and the Compulsive Reader book review website raves: "In its gorgeous use of language, its extraordinary structure, its ambitiously realised depths, and above all, the magic it works on its reader, Gould's Book of Fish is a masterpiece".

In any case, I don't believe reviewing is about being right or wrong. Instead, we should be turning back to the book to understand what might have provoked such extreme reactions.

Brian Matthews prophetically put his finger on the controversy in his own review in Australian Book Review last October. "It is a challenging read and may turn out to be one of those books that sort readers out - some passionately for; others straightforwardly against," he wrote. "Well, I'm for."

For the record, so am I. The extraordinary ambition, energy, and sheer scope of Gould's Book of Fish, the tension of a highly controlled book constantly threatening to bounce out of control altogether, just bowled me over. Like many others, I was enthralled by its Swiftian descent into the ordure of exaggeration, distortion and lies of history for the purpose of plucking out a little truth and beauty. Read it if you want to discover what has happened to Australian satire.

It's also a marvellous celebration of the book. Picador in Australia and Grove/Atlantic overseas have produced exquisite hardback editions with beautiful fishy illustrations and chapters written in different colored inks - all an ironic counterpoint to the "dreadful hodgepodge" of the book within the story, a magic document made of dried fish skin, blood and excrement.

Majority verdicts on a book by its contemporaries, however, never have the last word. As Martin Amis reminds us in his book of essays and reviews, The War Against Cliche, "In the long term . . . literature will resist levelling and revert to hierarchy. This isn't the decision of some snob of a belletrist. It is the decision of Judge Time, who constantly separates those who last from those who don't."

Over to you, judge.


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