Question 7
Richard Flanagan
Knopf, 2023
In Question 7, Richard Flanagan traces the connections and events that have shaped him, some transitory and personal, some ubiquitous and universal. Question 7, “who loves longer?” is the central idea that Flanagan emphasises in writing “no more than a love note to my parents and my island home” as he traces formative individuals who not only brought about his existence but allowed for his flourishing as a writer.
His father’s story is partially fictionalised in his masterpiece, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, where Flanagan tells the story of Australian POWs, and in Question 7 considers how close his father came to death during that time, attributing his survival to the surrender of Japan due to the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Flanagan goes to Japan to meet camp guards who tortured his father and considers the history of the bomb, inspired by a story written by H.G. Wells which goes on to spark the imagination of Leo Szilard, who works on the Manhattan Project.
The genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines is a dominant subject of this text and the attitudes of hatred remain unchanged hundreds of years later when Flanagan goes to Oxford on a scholarship. The attitude of those who perpetuated a system that stole everything sacred from the Aboriginal people and then blamed them for their suffering in the aftermath is seen to be vividly flourishing.
Flanagan’s own death experience, which has haunted him throughout his life, is the final section of the text, during which he faces drowning over several hours in a kayaking incident on the Franklin River. Despite his survival, he realises later in life that it was a death, and the trauma stays with him.
Of particular beauty are the sections where Flanagan recounts his mother’s re-evaluations of her life and her treatment of her children before her death, as she sobs recounting how she used to hit them while her son holds her hand.
Interestingly, he partially ascribes his own achievements as a writer to the incompetence of the GP in his small Tasmanian town growing up, who failed to properly diagnose his hearing problems which forced him to engage entirely with the written word as he struggled to hear and make himself understood.
Question 7 is a thought-provoking and profoundly moving evaluation of how the connections that we make in life have unseen and untold consequences that expand beyond our unfettered imaginations.
