The best-read person I know pulled me aside as we were visiting his apartment. He had a book to convey as a gift. Knowing the range of subjects I’ll tackle and with a good sense around what would pique my interest, he began, “This Richard Flanagan book is hard to describe.” Part memoir. Part history. Part love story.

“But,” George added, “he writes like a god.”

I began reading as soon as we returned home.

Question 7 (2023) by Richard Flanagan is a genre-defying memoir that examines the choices we make and the resulting chain reactions that explode halfway around the world and decades into the future. The choices Flannagan considers begin with the love affair of H.G. Wells and Rebecca West. He then take the reader through the work of nuclear physicists in the 1930s, the horrors of Japanese slave labor camps near Hiroshima, the world-changing 1945 atomic bomb attack on that city, and the fear of a young man trapped in rapids on a wild river, unsure if he is to live or die. But to lay them out in this sequential order does a disservice to Flanagan’s extraordinary ability to meld dream, history, science, and memory in this masterpiece.

The title relates to an early Chekhov story. The Russian author believed that the role of literature was not to provide answers but only to ask the necessary questions. In Chekhov’s stories, “the only fools are those with answers.” This belief permeates Flanagan’s writing.

So much of this work hinges on the fact that Flanagan’s Tasmanian father was a frail and dying slave in a Japanese mining camp during World War II when the Enola Gay banked over Hiroshima and dropped the first bomb that would quickly end the war, sparing his father’s life and permitting, if you will, Flanagan to have a place in this world. The book begins as the author returns to that camp to find the only thing near the former entrance to the mine is a love hotel. No memorial, no sign, no evidence that the camp ever existed. It is, he writes, “as if the need to forget is as strong as the need to remember. Perhaps stronger.”

And yes, Flanagan does indeed write like a god.

Consider this paragraph as Flanagan describes the father he remembers as a young boy.

“He saw the world aslant. It was for him a great tragicomedy in which the comedy was made poignant by the tragedy and the tragedy rendered bearable by the comedy. When the subject was sad or serious, he would smile wanly, his face turning inside out, a concertina of wrinkles compressing his eyes into wry sunken currants, and from him would flow a riversong of stories.”

This is a work that becomes a deep meditation “on the past of one man and the history that coalesced in his existence.” It is the butterfly effect of history, beginning with the tumultuous love affair that leads a frustrated Wells to write a book almost no one read, except for a physicist bedeviled by the question of nuclear fission who sees an answer in this story. Wells, it turns out, “had an unnerving ability to discern the destructive possibilities of embryonic scientific discoveries and new technology.” This same physicist plays a key role in ensuring that the Allies, not the Nazis, end up developing the bomb. Late in the book, Flanagan’s own near-death experience as a river guide trapped underwater by rapids, brings the fragility and unpredictability of life full circle.

Question 7 is a masterful piece of story craft. Flanagan’s begins with a kiss in front of a bookcase between West and Wells, moves through baths and traffic lights to arrive at the Manhattan Project. His gaze at the life lived by his parents after the war is loving yet sharp. His questions are moving and profound.

“Experience is but a moment. Making sense of that moment is a life.” Memories aren’t facts but stories, Flanagan contends, our lives an “ongoing invention.” 

More to come . . .

DJB

Photos of Atomic Dome and Hiroshima Peace Memorial Garden by DJB