Outstanding. Literary, insightful, entertaining, profound. ( )

Another brilliant work by Richard Flanagan! ( )

It is with temerity that I have tagged this post about Question 7 as a 'book review'. The truth is that it's impossible to contribute anything coherent about the experience of reading Richard Flanagan's latest book...

It's such an emotional experience, and like The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013, see my inadequate thoughts here) it is magnificent but it becomes overwhelming. The reading needs to be punctuated by long walks and meditative strolls in the garden, by strong coffee and the occasional generous single-malt. The prose is exquisite in its evocation of an image, a memory, or a feeling. Flanagan's words absorb all attention; they are insistent.

It was only many years after it happened that I began to understand. That what occurred is still occurring. I wrote about the story in one way a long time ago for another novel, my first. Though I tried to be honest, it was still happening and so it was dishonest. That's what I couldn't see then that I see now, that though it happened then it's still happening now and it won't ever stop happening, and that writing about it, that writing about anything, can't be an opinion about what happened as if it had already happened when it is still happening, still unintelligible, still mysterious, and all writing is trapped in tenses when life isn't. Life is always happening and has happened and will happen, and the only writing that can have any worth confounds time and stands outside of it, swims with it and flies with it and dives deep within it, seeking the answer to one question: who loves longer? (p.99)

This enigmatic question derives from the title. It comes from one of Chekhov's short stories 'Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician', a parody of those problem-solving questions that we used to get at school:

Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?

Who?

You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer? And why do we do what we do to each other?

That's question 7. (p.24)

The image that haunts this passage is Flanagan himself, trapped for hours in a kayak in a rising Tasmanian river, when he was twenty-one. Though writing about it is 'trapped in tenses', for him, this near-drowning is not in the past. The miracle of his survival is always with him. He retells this experience towards the end of the book with such compelling force that the awestruck reader feels like a helpless witness to his terror and despair.

In a blend of history, autofiction and memoir, Flanagan in Question 7 unravels another miraculous survival — his father's. Flanagan fictionalised his father's experience when a POW on the Death Railway in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Those of us who read it will never forget the mud, the rain, the hunger and the savage brutality that killed so many men. Now in Question 7 he tells us that his father survived because the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war. If the war had not ended then, his father would almost certainly have perished, as did so many thousands of those slave-labourers. In a trail of events segmented by other aspects of the narrative, Flanagan traces the circuitous history of the development of those atomic bombs, starting in the early 20th century with an novelist's imaginative conception of what such a bomb could be and do, progressing through the WW2 race to develop one before the Germans did, and heroising the role of those who foresaw its horrors, and tried to prevent them.

Flanagan likely owes his existence to that first atomic bomb, and perhaps I do too. Late in his life my father told me that his life was likely saved by the US use of atomic bombs to force a Japanese surrender. With the war in Europe over, his regiment was about to embark for war in the Pacific where the casualty rate was expected to be catastrophic. It was a chastening discovery. I had always thought that the use of atomic bombs was an atrocity and a war crime: Hiroshima was morally wrong, and Nagasaki even more so, but they quite probably saved my father's life. It is hard to come to terms with this.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/01/10/question-7-2023-by-richard-flanagan/ ( )