‘Question 7’

Richard Flanagan’s latest book is a semi-autobiographical memoir and his last, as he claims to have nothing further to write about. We’ll see how that plays out. It’s a curious mixture of his episodic family history, H.G. Wells and the race to develop the atomic bomb during WW2. 

The author visited Hiroshima, where his father was labouring nearby as a prisoner of war when it was bombed. He then links in Leo Szilard, an important scientist in the race, and the influence of Wells’s writing on him and political thinking at that time. And Rebecca West’s influence on H.G. 

Flanagan must have been writing almost concurrently with production of the film Oppenheimer, which also features Szilard as a collaborator on the bomb’s creation, while Flanagan gives him prime importance. However the author’s take on this fascinating period is nevertheless full of historical insights and well-told.

Woven into this already full agenda are Flanagan’s vivid descriptions of his own frontier life in rural Tasmania as a boy, and his near-death experience later as a young river guide who gets jammed in wild river rocks with his kayak. Both themes are engaging, vividly told and the latter is harrowing. 

Although the author tries hard to establish some sort of philosophical causality in all his themes, I wasn’t convinced that they really hang together. Each is captivating in itself and makes for interesting reading, if you put aside the forced connections. Maybe the jammed kayak is an apt metaphor for the book’s structure?

Question 7 is taken from a Chekhov short story: ‘Who loves longer, a man or a woman?’, and it’s no spoiler to say that he does not explicitly answer it, which he foreshadows anyway early on. In my humble opinion, he doesn’t answer it implicitly or otherwise.

No worries, just enjoy the ride, as there’s some wonderful prose in this book.