QUESTION 7 by Richard Flanagan — reviewed by Stella

This is a remarkable piece of writing. A memoir, a story about his parents, a family history, an island’s history, a treatise on writing, a question — the question, an exploration of death, of guilt, of shame, and of dominance and harm, but also a book of forgiveness, of wonder, hope, and most definitely, of love. Here tossed up in a looping story literary geniuses rub shoulders with brilliant physicists, and the ordinary Tasmanian, alongside the forgotten, are wheeled in and brilliantly scooped up into a telling of the everything and the particular, and it’s also immensely personal. A telling which is now, the future, and the past. A past which is 40,000 years; and just a blip— a few 1000, and also the merest moment. The bomb. This is a book which talks of war and consequence, where trauma feeds its way into the rivers of generations, where violence is erased, where memory is what we have in all its unreliability, where a truth may be found in what is unsaid or voided. As the reader, are we in the river, beside it keeping pace, or watching it flow past?  Or do we find ourselves in one of its many tributaries letting the current take us, to discover we need to turn back and fight our way upstream? Or is this just the task of the writer? There is turbulence — a power working at us. But when we are midstream all is clear whether we are swimming or flying. There is calm, and humour, and an imagination that brilliantly guides us and buoys us on. Flanagan’s father was a POW in Japan. Without the bombing of Hiroshima he would have died. If he had died, the author would not exist. The bomb changed the world. H.G. Wells wrote a book because he was confused about love. A book which inspired a Hungarian Jewish scientist to have an idea about nuclear chain reaction, and then fear drove him to both embrace and reject the consequences. The wry brilliance of Chekhov filters through the pages. The love of language — of words — is delightfully explored on the page and in childhood memories, and in the author’s descriptions of his father’s reading and reciting. And here is the connection to the earth: as his mother fills bags of red soil at the side of the open road for her grey Hobart suburban plot, as Flanagan lies beneath his car by the river on a dewy night, as his great-great-grandfather labours, and his mother’s father ploughs. And here is the story of genocide, whether it is here, or over there, of violence that permeates and of lives that cannot be extinguished. Question 7 is compelling, thoughtful and almost overwhelming. It’s storytelling at its finest — powerful, beautiful and deeply moving.