A review of Richard Flanagan's Question 7
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At the risk of repeating the acts for which Rebecca West gained such notoriety, and became an unwitting antecedent to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on the 6th of August 1945, I embark on the humble task of a book review.
A spurious claim, yes, but in the hands of Flanagan, the spurious becomes inevitable. Cause and effect, the “slow yielding of one thing to another,” are the needles that sew Question 7 together: a review begets a kiss begets a book begets a bomb begets a son begets a drowning begets a life begets Question 7. And then history repeats, so to the review we return.
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The experience of Question 7 was not unlike my own visit to Tasmania (Flanagan’s home state). The various competing narratives you dip in and out of make the book feel saturated with life. It brims with it. Tasmania was the same. I had never seen so much wildlife: black cockatoos screeching above; blue-tongued lizards lounging below; wallabies and bandicoots bounding beyond. It was immense. But as life felt so much larger, so too did death. Neither had I seen so much roadkill before. On some strips every 5 metres. Walking down a Tasmanian roadside one saw death, and took it in their stride. In all its beauty, all its horror, all its banality, all at once. Question 7 was the same. By focussing on the intricacies of the many lives that surround and lead up to Flanagan’s own, from writers H.G. Wells and Rebecca West to eminent scientist Leo Szilard, imagineer of the nuclear chain reaction, to Flanagan’s parents and family, to the “60,000, or 80,000, or 140,000 people” of Hiroshima, death, or more accurately, Oblivion, looms ever larger behind them all. With each new character the nothingness, from which they are born and that claims them when they go, grows more pronounced. So, if the questions that spring from the fount of Oblivion interest you, I recommend Question 7.
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But what sorts of questions are those? I hear you ask. Some are Flanagan’s own, large lumbering things such as “does time heal?”, “would I have done the same?”, or “what remains?” Others shout out from history, voices of the dead renewed with life. Voices like co-pilot Captain Robert Lewis of the B-29 that released the atomic bomb, “My God […] What have we done?” Or Chekhov, from whose absurdist short story the novel owes its name, and whose illogical and necessary question echoes perennially throughout, “who loves longer?” It is, in short, a novel of many questions. And with each question uttered, building from the question before, we the readers are left with one towering, insurmountable, unavoidable why? That original question which, Flanagan concedes from the outset, we can never answer, and must always ask. So, if you are tired of novels pretending to have the answers, I recommend Question 7.
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In his final chapter Flanagan returns to the cold whirling eddies of the Franklin river. A river he drowned in over 40 years ago, and sought to “exorcise” himself from in his debut novel Death of a River Guide. He confesses to have been drowning in it ever since. Indeed, even Question 7’s beautiful cover (hidden beneath a rather inconspicuous, even plain, book jacket design) envelopes the story in the blues and whites of a rapid. The experience was Flanagan’s own brush with Oblivion and, in time, revealed to him “the immense gravity of living in the wake of death.” I think it is in that quote that one can find the salient difference in approach from his debut to now. In Death of a River Guide, Flanagan determined Ajlaz Cosini to actually die, so his focus rests in Oblivion, unable or unwilling to see beyond it. In Question 7, comparatively, Flanagan engages with the experience of death reflexively, using it as a source from which to breathe meaning into life, ultimately recognising this meaning making process as the individual’s most significant act.
For his parents, that meaning was love: “for them to live, love had to exist […] with the passing of time this illusion became their hard-won truth. It was a form of magic and they the magicians.” Such love continues on even after their passing, Question 7 being a self-professed “love note” to his mother and father, and the Tasmania they inhabited together. His writings on their lives, in typical Flanagan fashion, both warm and wrench the heart but I found his most effecting passage on them to be this, “My mother and my father—”. It is a novel that tackles life, death, the atrocity of Hiroshima, and the genocide and prison-slave systems of colonial Tasmania, but it is only when attempting to convey what his parents were to him that his exacting pen briefly falters. It is in that silence, where words aren’t enough, that his love is truly seen, read, felt. Whatever the verb.
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All in all, Question 7 covers some enormous ground in a humble 275 pages. When I decided to embark on this journey of a book review I worried an absence of criticism may weaken my credibility in the eyes of you, my discerning reader. I read Question 7, and I read it again, and found very little to say in the negative. Were my own eyes not discerning enough? Then, a final phrase flitted through my mind, garnered from the wisdom of a 4-year-old boy from rural Tasmania who decided to become a novelist, “the words of a book are never the book, the soul of it is everything.” I found the soul of this book is beautiful indeed, so I have nothing poor to say of its words.
And so, as the dust on my copy finally settles and my review winds down to a close, I leave you with this simple remark: if you’re looking for a good book, I recommend Question 7.