BookBrowse Reviews The Dragon Behind the Glass by Emily Voigt

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A riveting journey into the bizarre world of the Asian arowana or "dragon fish" - the world's most expensive aquarium fish.

How can you tell when an obsession has truly grown out of control? When a country, in this case Singapore, boasts of a mechanic turned repairman for fish. Yes, you heard that right: For. Fish. And if this whole thing sounds a little...well, fishy, consider this: The person who does this job, "Dr. Arowana," as he is referred to, pioneered the use of diamond-cutting tools to fix the eyeballs of the legendary creature under scrutiny – the Asian arowana, or dragon fish. "Two decades later, there's now a cottage industry of fin jobs, jaw tucks, and piscine eye lifts," points out the doggedly perseverant journalist Emily Voigt in her brilliant narrative nonfiction debut, The Dragon Behind the Glass: A True Story of Power, Obsession, And the World's Most Coveted Fish.

And coveted the arowana is. Among the fish's many different color varieties, especially prized is the Super Red, native to a single remote lake system in the heart of Borneo. Ironically, the interest in the arowana began innocently when they were bought for aquariums in southeast Asia, but an increasing belief that the fish brought good luck to their owners slowly accelerated sales. The arowana quantities in the wild started diminishing and the fish was listed in the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red Data Book (commonly known as the ICUN Red List) of threatened species. What really sparked the obsession, however, is the arowana's inclusion in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, a treaty known simply as CITES (pronounced sigh-tees) (see Beyond the Book). The designation was enough to spawn a whole industry devoted to cultivating the arowana, with millions of dollars invested in high-tech research centers devoted to just this one species of fish.

"The dragon fish is one of the most dramatic examples of a modern paradox – the mass-produced endangered species," Voigt writes. The best varieties are insanely expensive – an albino Asian arowana with red eyes for example, reportedly sold for $150,000. For one fish. In Behind the Glass, Voigt brilliantly dives into the world of the creature, fishing for information from the slippery mafia behind the exotic trade, attending aquaculture conventions around the world and consulting experts to feed her appetite for more information about the elusive arowana.

And while she sees plenty of the farmed variety all securely guarded behind glass, Voigt develops her own obsession to find the species in the wild, an exploration that soon swims out of control as she goes fishing, only figuratively, in some of the most remote and dangerous places of the world, including Myanmar (Burma), a country that is almost as isolated as North Korea. She makes friends in high places and hitches her fortunes to Heiko Bleher, a well known – if unreliable – fish trader turned ichthyologist. With his help, and often without, Voigt travels to 15 countries over the space of three and a half years.

The book morphs into an exciting scavenger hunt and travelogue as Voigt vividly describes the dense forested landscapes she visits – from Borneo to the Tenasserim River in Myanmar and more. Voigt's fluidly changing objectives mirror the Super Red's elusive nature and soon she finds other fish to fry leading the reader on a journey that is at once informative, adventurous and just plain fun.

The Dragon Behind the Glass is not just a marvelous peek into an industry very few of us have heard of, it's an immensely enjoyable portrait of the lengths we can go to feed our obsessions. "Across all those miles, I felt the dark, far-off swamp that spawned the Super Red tug at me like a magnet. I wanted to get to the wild place – to see a fish that counted as part of the natural world," Voigt explains.

We get it, we really do. So...go fish!

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in July 2016, and has been updated for the May 2017 edition. Click here to go to this issue.