The Fish
by Lloyd Jones
(Penguin, $36)
In Lloyd Jones' The Fish, a wayward daughter gives birth in a foetid caravan by the sea. The baby is different — so markedly different that his grandfather refuses to hold him. Our narrator, the child's young uncle, watches his family shift to accommodate their strange new kin, their Fish.
Jones' previous novel, The Cage, was an unsettling commentary on the murkiest parts of human nature — the way we can acclimate to terrible conditions and grow indifferent to brutality. A rich allegory, the novel takes place somewhere faintly recognisable as New Zealand in a dystopian future, and contrasts its detachment against a deeply affecting darkness.
In The Fish, the same allegorical tone pervades (with its accompanying vagueness), only this time it grows frustrating. Readers may spend the entire novel wondering what the hell is going on with "the Fish".
His "fishiness" is exaggerated in early chapters: a piscine odour overwhelms his mother's tiny caravan and, on several occasions, he is alleged to have gills. Descriptions of the child — alternately referred to as him, our Fish and It — focus on his wide mouth, his loping movements and bulging eyes. Our narrator says, "It is a fish, yet we have to pretend it isn't."