Cultural cringing aside, Gould’s Book of Fish is indeed an astonishing book. Set in the early 19th century, the novel chronicles the misadventures of a certain William Buelow Gould, a debauched, begrimed counterfeiter who dabbles in the not-so-fine art of painting pub signs to settle his bar tabs. Bundled aboard a British convict ship bound for the penal colonies of Tasmania — or Van Diemen’s Land — Gould hits on an idea: he’ll pretend to be an artist, which will earn him the respect of his captors, and maybe allow him to take on the odd portrait job in lieu of hard labor. The scheme, he points out, "didn’t begin so well."

My first attempt at a painting, admittedly somewhat derivative of a lithograph of Robespierre I chanced across in a pamphlet illustrating the horrors of the French Terror, was of Captain Pinchbeck, the commander of the convict transport, who had requested his own portrait upon discovering my trade. My picture so angered the captain that he had me clapped back in chains for the rest of the boat’s six-month journey to Australia.

So begins this sprawling comedy of terrors. Once incarcerated in Tasmania’s dreaded Sarah Island penal colony, our antihero encounters a slew of grotesque characters: Lieutenant Horace, the colony’s Kurtz-like commandant who, through a variety of grandiose schemes, attempts to turn his prison into a European-style nation-state; Tobias Lempriere, the prison surgeon, who aims to make a name for himself as a Man of Science by shipping barrels of pickled "blackfella" heads off to England; Pobjoy, a spectacularly violent guard who commissions Gould to paint knockoff Constables; Twopenny Sal, a native woman with whom Gould embarks on an ill-fated love affair; and Castlereagh, a large, murderous pig.

Meanwhile, Gould’s effort to ease his load by posing as an artist leads him into all sorts of dreadful pickles: bouts on the ominously named Cockchafing machine; a watery cell that nightly threatens to drown him; plus countless beatings, deprivations, and sundry humiliations. Eventually, Lempriere recruits Gould to create a visual taxonomy of the island’s fish. The task at first frightens him, then consumes him, and finally drives him well beyond the edge of madness. In a gothic-fairy-tale twist, Gould mutates — at least in spirit — and is drawn into the world of the creatures he paints.

If not for the book’s lyrical, sensuous language, its moments of rollicking comedy, its celebration of life in the midst of suffering, insanity, and death, Gould’s Book of Fish would be a depiction of hell-on-earth every bit as chilling as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. As it is, the book is a surprisingly pleasurable read. No matter what horrors befall him, Gould’s voice remains lively, even exuberant, throughout.

Given the dreamlike feel of much of Gould’s Book of Fish, it comes as a surprise to learn that William Buelow Gould is an actual historical figure, an English petty criminal who was transported to the Sarah Island penal colony in the early 19th century, and who spent much of his time there painting watercolor studies of native wildlife. Flanagan stumbled across his protagonist a decade ago, as he browsed through a library in Hobart. "Someone said to me, ‘Have you ever seen Gould’s Book of Fish?’ " he recalls. "It was this crusty old archivist, the type who makes choices as to what they will and won’t share with you. On this day he was feeling favorably disposed. He got the book out of this wardrobe and showed it to me." The book, a collection of 28 watercolors, changed Flanagan’s life.

"I was astonished," he says. "The paintings had a beautiful luminosity to them. There was a great love and humanity in them. I’d never heard of this book of fish. Gould is known in a small way here, because he was a convict artist, but he has no great name because his is a rude man’s art. He was a hack. But these fish had something wonderful about them, and no one seemed to care. No one seemed to have noticed."

What really struck Flanagan that day was the fact that Gould’s fish looked so human. "No paintings exist of any of the convicts who were sent to Sarah Island," he says. "So you have this death camp with no images of anyone who went there. All we have left are these fish. It just charmed me the way he had somehow smuggled out something of the people within. He had pleased his masters, but at the same time had done something completely subversive."

This belief became the organizing principle of the novel. Each of its 12 chapters is prefaced by one of Gould’s watercolors — the pot-bellied seahorse, the kelpy, the crested weedfish — and each fish represents a central character in that chapter. The podgy Tobias Lempriere, for example, is embodied in the porcupine fish, a bug-eyed, pear-shaped, rather absurd-looking creature.

In another unusual design element, each chapter is printed in a different color ink, which is meant to reflect the fact that Flanagan’s Gould (no text exists in the real book of fish) penned his story with whatever materials came to hand: blood from a freshly picked scab, crushed sea urchin, fecal matter, and so on. The combination of the paintings and the multicolored text not only makes for a visually gorgeous book, it adds yet another dimension to the constantly shifting question of how much of this story is actually real.

"Firstly," says Flanagan, "there’s not much that’s true in that novel." In fact, although he is a trained historian — his first published work was an overview of British unemployment — Flanagan is scornful of the idea that history can reveal objective, irrefutable truths. Neither does he have much time for historical novels, which, he says, tend to adopt a posture of authority by using such facile devices as describing the smell of vinegar on the deck of a ship. His, he says, is an "anti-historical novel," and closer to the real Tasmania for it.

"Historians create these hermetic systems that don’t allow for any chaos or disorder," Flanagan says. "But life is chaos and disorder. It seems to me to be such a wonderfully European way of thinking: this railway line of thought stopping at all the stations of human progress. But in Tasmania, that’s a completely useless way of looking at things. It doesn’t explain a place like that." What does explain Tasmania, he continues, "are these circular stories that people tell, that don’t have a beginning or an end, that digress relentlessly, that somehow envelop the past and also explain the present, that remain with you."

Gould’s Book of Fish certainly has the circular-storytelling technique down pat. The narrative doesn’t so much flow as churn. The story line is a squiggle. The chronology is a jumble. The book is by turns dreamily surreal, grimly realistic, satirical, philosophical, romantic, slapstick, and tragic.

And then there’s Gould, the most unreliable of unreliable narrators. Not only is he a self-confessed con artist, but we find out early in the book that his tale is being transcribed, from memory, by another self-confessed con artist. "I am William Buelow Gould," he announces at one point. "I am compelled by my lack of virtue to tell you that I am the most untrustworthy guide you will ever trust ..."

Indeed, Gould is a mash of contradictions: conscientious and corrupt, idealistic and cynical, meditative and feral. One moment he’s flinging shit across his cell and scratching his "licy balls," the next he’s lampooning "the nobility of science" and quoting Blake. If it weren’t so artfully assembled, Gould’s story would be nothing more than, as one character in the book describes it, "a dreadful hodgepodge."

While some critics have called Gould’s Book of Fish just that, Flanagan insists he’s just writing what he knows. "I grew up in a world that only understood itself through story," he says. "I heard endless stories, and people would tease apart these stories, they’d retell them again and again, they’d add something or cut something, and other people would be throwing things in. In Tasmania, if you tell a story about what happened in the pub last night, they’ll tell you one about what happened to their mother in 1950 when she was working as a telephonist. There’s nothing that relates, and yet somehow they connect profoundly."

Nonetheless, when he set about writing the book, Flanagan suffered periods of crippling self-doubt. "I couldn’t make it work," he says. "It just completely failed. I knew what I wanted to achieve, but I felt I wasn’t a good enough writer to do it. So I was wracked by the most terrible doubt, which compounds your problems, because a book like this is a high-wire act. You have to approach it with gusto and abandon and recklessness. The moment you lose your ability to behave like that, the writing falls away. I spent a year completely depressed."

To clear his head, Flanagan embarked on a kind of global walkabout, visiting Belgrade and touring Northern Australia with a friend’s country-and-western band. The exercise was less than successful. "I’d sort of intersperse these bizarre odysseys with bouts of intense work that only seemed to ruin the book further," he says. "So I’d go somewhere else." For Flanagan, this bout of writer’s block had implications far more dire than a sense of artistic failure. "Writing is a precarious thing with someone like me," he explains. "I have a family. I don’t have any other source of income. I live or die by what I write."

In the end, not only did Flanagan write his book, he wrote something of a masterpiece. More exciting for the author, perhaps, is the fact that he ended up writing a book that is truly Tasmanian — a "joyous" thing. "Here is a way of understanding the world," he says, "of explaining my world to me."

In a review of one of Flanagan’s previous novels, a critic griped about the fact that it didn’t seem very Australian. When asked if he thinks Gould’s Book of Fish might avoid this sort of criticism, Flanagan’s wriggling takes on an added urgency. "There are good writers and there are bad writers," he says. "There are no American writers. There are no Australian writers. There are just writers."

Perhaps, but some of these writers happen to live, for better or worse, on a shark’s-tooth-shaped island at the end of the earth, where invaders once sought to create an English garden among the eucalyptus trees, and where people still look abroad in search of culture. Flanagan’s narrator calls Tasmania "an island of forgetting." It is, the author says, a place in search of an idea of itself. In Gould’s Book of Fish — with its swirling pastiche of humor and horror, squalor and splendor — Flanagan has hit on a remarkable truth. He has re-created Tasmania in its own image.

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com