Swimming in magic realism

Saturday, 22nd June 2002

Well, of course they are. And I daresay I am simply a jaded old book reviewer who has lingered too long in the worlds of Grass, Garcia Marquez and others. Those butterflies, those missing pages, they come round as regularly in literature as the incendiary pronouncements of Mr Tom Paulin. Supposedly produced by Gould in the confines of his saltwater cell, the tide surging in each night, writing materials ranging between cuttlefish ink and green laudanum, what follows is an immensely entertaining selection of tall tales: Gould's early life in England, transportation, arrival on the blighted rock of Sarah Island, the life-saving commission from Mr Tobias Achilles LempriŒre, the resident surgeon, all set down in a sprightly pastiche borrowed from God knows how many contemporary gazetteers:

Nod like the lucky bastards you are, like nobby Hobart Town clerks who breakfast on the upper storey of the Colonial Secretary's office watching early morning public excecutions, fat arses flapping on padded seats, enjoying in comfort & company with the jolly pissy taste of fried kidneys still sweet in their gob the spectacle directly across Murray Street at the gaol entrance of a good gibbet.

There is a tremendous energy about all this, every sentence throwing up its cargo of alliterative special effects. The island, diligently and horrifyingly anatomised, is an extraordinary topsy-turvy world in miniature: LempriŒre sending back his pickled aborigine heads to the Royal Society, the monomaniacal governor trying to recreate a vision of 'Europe' (architecture, steam trains and so on) gleaned from the letters of the sister of the dead English officer he is impersonating. On the debit side the influence of Peter Carey - the Peter Carey of Illywhacker and Oscar and Lucinda - is perhaps a touch obtrusive, and the effort required to deconstruct a sentence like

Death hid in the rancorous odour of beatings, in the new buildings already falling apart with the insidious damp that invaded everything, was seeping out of sphincters rotting from repeated rapes

a touch exhausting. This being the early 19th century, down at the core lies a lot of stuff about Voltaire, the Enlightenment, the death of realism and definitions being the property of those who define them, which is the oldest of old hat. Full marks to Richard Flanagan for his powers of pastiche and his imaginative range, but we have been here before. Repeatedly.