Gould’s Book of Fish (Richard Flanagan)

If a late Salman Rushdie book, such as The Ground Beneath Her Feet, went out on the town and drank Bloody Marys and absinthe for hours and then returned home, hit its head on the doorframe as it stumbled inside, collapsed in front of the loo and vomited 400 pages onto the porcelain, this is the kind of thing it would find in the bathroom when finally, its head pounding, its stomach churning, its teeth furred and fusty, it awoke.

I read the whole book, because I like to finish books once I’ve started them, but I was looking at my watch and counting the number of pages left from very early on. It wasn’t just the constant gut-churning references to pus and vomit and faecal matter and decaying corpses and bizarre machines for early nineteenth century torture. I would kind of expect those in a book about Australia’s convict past.

It was the ponderous, flabby symbolism that brought me out in a rash. Fish that represent people. A penal island that represents Australia. A forger who represents the author. A book about a book that represents the book.

Ew!! Reading this book is a bit like doing a jigsaw made of lard.

If this book was a person, it would be that annoying girl from your first year uni English tutorial – fat, loud and smugly obsessed with postmodern literary tricks. And she wouldn’t shut up!

In a nutshell: a convicted forger sent to a miserable prison island off the coast of Tasmania becomes obsessed with painting fish.

Gould’s Book of Fish scores just three chocolates out of a possible ten: a strawberry cream, an orange cream, and a coffee cream.