A few years ago, I met up with my friend Michael Reynolds, editor-in-chief of Europa Editions and publisher of such global luminaries as Elena Ferrante and Mieko Kawakami, at a bar in our Brooklyn neighborhood. I was working on a piece about Richard Flanagan, the Booker Prize-winning Tasmanian author. Over Negronis, Michael, an Australian expat, mentioned that a Flanagan reading was the first time he’d heard a musicality in the Australian accent and argot: those cadences and “looooong” vowels and double-diphthongs. His pulse raced and his eyes welled with tears.
Flanagan’s new book, Question 7, is, as Michael now suggests, “a big, desperate, dire, ambitious cri de coeur,” interrogating the human condition with a ferocity rare in contemporary literature. Its internal structure entwines multiple narratives and methods, much like the body meshes organs, nerves, bones, and other tissue into a robust woman. Memoir, fiction, criticism, political punditry, a pinch of travelogue: Flanagan sees a mash-up of genres as the form perfectly tailored to our mashed-up era — history as theater of the absurd.
Flanagan borrows his title from a Chekhov tale, initially framing Question 7 as a memoir, but with a plethora of secret passages, trapdoors, alcoves that reveal actual figures in the middle of their lives, like dioramas, talking and acting out their desires. Question 7 opens with a 2012 trip to Japan: he interviews elderly former guards from the Ohama POW camp where his father had labored as a slave during World War II, assuredly a death sentence — except an American President had decided to detonate an atomic bomb over nearby Hiroshima, resulting in Emperor Hirohito’s unconditional surrender and his liberation. In Sanyo-Onada City, Flanagan accompanies an acquaintance, Kenji Y—, to a “hostess house” where he chats with an English-speaking woman oblivious to the fates of the Australian POWs. Both East and West are guilty of willful amnesia. Flanagan’s research yields little more than the vertigo induced by a major earthquake, 7.3 on the Richter scale.
That he glides seamlessly from his own story, and those of his parents, to H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s illicit romance, then to Leo Szilard’s nuclear-fission eureka, is only one of many achievements on the page. Flanagan’s evocation of his childhood in rural Tasmania is stippled with wit and immediacy. The fifth of six kids, he depicts his family’s move to Rosebery as an intimate bit of cinema: “Here we all are in the Ford Zephyr, sprawled out and jammed up on the parcel shelf, out the window screaming into the rain and rainforest and spreadeagled over the transmission hump, one brother wearing a snorkel to avoid another brother’s farts, pushing and shoving and being shoved until parting when our father’s frustrated hand flails over the front bench seat into the back to re-establish order, his disembodied voice crying out in exasperation, ‘I don’t care who started it, I’ll finish it!’ before a wild swerve throws us all back on top of each other and the squealing and shoving start all over again.”
Descended from exiled Irish convicts, this father is austere, holding himself apart. A schoolteacher, he values knowledge and the written word, which he bequeaths to his semi-deaf son. (Flanagan’s hearing loss was later surgically corrected.) His mother drives the car, literally, attentive and nurturing yet ready to give a recalcitrant child a smack on the bum. The lush bush looms around them: “celery top pines, pandani, Tasmanian laurels and peppers and leatherwoods, the giant manferns and primeval sassafras and craggy myrtles, the rainforest that no one then knows is the second largest of its kind in the world.” Question 7 is a mournful dirge for a natural realm savaged by saws and tractors and bulldozers.
More than a vivid recreation of one boy’s inner life, the book is also a mural of ideas. Flanagan wrangles with a peculiar moral issue: if the U.S. had not dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima, would I exist? (The answer is a likely no.) Does an epic tragedy eclipse personal survival and triumph?
Flanagan scatters motifs across his chapters, emanating from the fall of a single domino, a single moment that unleashes a chain of explosive energy: a kiss exchanged in front of a bookcase, between the 19-year-old West and the 46-year-old Wells. Flustered, the acclaimed science fiction master then fled to Switzerland where he composed a forgotten novel, The World Set Free, which conjured a planet pummeled by nuclear weapons. (Cormac McCarthy’s The Road inherits some of its literary DNA from Wells’s text; and in turn Flanagan’s obsession with obliteration and the futility of language mirrors McCarthy’s themes in The Passenger and Stella Maris.) Flanagan stitches imagined scenes into verified events, tracing a slightly-curved line from The World Set Free to Leo Szilard’s epiphany at a London traffic light, its perpetual switch from green to yellow to red triggering, in the portly Jewish physicist’s mind, the concept of a nuclear chain reaction. He feared the Third Reich would lay its gloved hands on his theorems, so he vaulted them deep inside the British government, only to excavate them once Roosevelt signed off on the Manhattan Project. Szilard, “a man who always through science existed within a web of morality,” lobbied hard for a ban on nuclear arsenals; an audience with the influential Eleanor Roosevelt was cancelled after her husband died suddenly in Warm Springs, Georgia.
Which brings Flanagan to the bright morning of August 6, 1945, as Colonel Paul Tibbets piloted his B-29, Enola Gay, at 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, poised to warp the trajectory of human history. Flanagan’s sentences are cool and clinical but somehow incantatory: “’Bomb away!’ said Thomas Ferebee, as the great silver-plated B-29 banked up and away and 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000 Japanese souls passed through the plane’s silver aluminum cladding and superstructure and the aircrew’s leather air suits, penetrating their skin and bones and organs such that they lit up as if they had swallowed a light more brilliant than the sun.” Bomb away! — Flanagan echoes this refrain while offering another: the ingratiating platitude “That’s Life,” which tips his tone from tender to caustic to resolved. Life spreads from us much as an ocean floor drifts from underwater thermal vents gouged amid subduction zones. Despite killer asteroids and mass extinctions, ice ages and greenhouse gasses, the biosphere has persisted, even flourished; one bipedal primate species is, at best, a large-brained afterthought.
We’re still tainted with irrational and vicious instincts. The issue of race — and particularly the genocide (his term) of Aboriginals — percolates throughout Question 7. “Tasmania tended to novelise its own experience,” Flanagan writes. “The island divined itself not through the prisms of ideology, religion, aesthetics, or politics as elsewhere, but through stories, endless and endlessly digressive … Sport was the only art allowed and its events and stars were most loved when they were inclined to the operatic. Small jokes became freighted with larger meaning: when the governor was coming to Rosebery, some miners stole the official limousine with its vice-regal regalia and drove it around the town with an Aboriginal man known as Blacktracker sitting in the governor’s seat, waving to the locals, a bitter joke which cut every way and was all the more tragic for being comic for both black and white, and all the more comic for being bitter to all.” Flanagan thunders against the settler-colonists’ harsh treatment of the indigenous population, bigotries he encountered as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. In his weaker spots he lapses into a didactic, grandiose voice.
Yet Question 7 vibrates with an atomic energy of its own, barely contained. At the end he revisits an incident from his debut novel, Death of a River Guide: a near-fatal accident at the age of 21, while shepherding kayakers along the Franklin River’s treacherous cascades and chutes. His kayak wedged at the bottom of a waterfall, his legs stuck, head lolled in precarious air bubble. After hours of failed attempts, he was rescued. Question 7 ponders mortality and how art may or may not ameliorate our fears; Flanagan uses an innovative construct inspired by a fourth tense in the Yolnju language: “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 is 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.” In Flanagan’s telling, past, present, and future collude to create something both urgent and serene, beyond time — a space, an equilibrium, a heaven.
This sequence overlaps with the plot in Death of a River Guide, which landed on the desk of a junior editor at Scribner in the mid-‘90s, prompting him to make an avid (and unsuccessful) pitch for U.S. rights. I’m just a few years younger than Flanagan, but I’ve lost my parents in the last decade; his elegies ring clear and true. Question 7 is a testament to the Before and After of those losses, how we finally see their arcs in full, begetting a compassion we neglected while they were alive. We can rewind, though: the purpose of memory. Or as Flanagan puts it, “Perhaps the past is where we are going and have never been.”
[Published by Knopf on September 17, 2024, 288 pages, $28.00 hardcover]