Gould's Book of Fish - Richard Flanagan

I didn't enjoy my previous attempt at Flanagan, so I was pleased that I allowed my preconceptions to be overcome here. Whereas The Unknown Terrorist was hectoring and literal, Gould's Book of Fish is oblique, bizarre and compelling, if often also fatiguing. The mode is a kind of grubby magical realism, Garccia Marquez trapped in a colonial Tasmanian sewer, with a little of Peter Ackroyd's shifts in time and identity thrown in. At times it is thrilling, at other times baffling, and the postscript throws everything else into a new relief.