QUESTION 7 by Richard Flanagan — reviewed by Thomas

In the Yolŋu language, it seems, there is a fourth tense, which conveys the reality that something that has happened is still happening now and will always be happening. (I suppose, by extension, something that happens is also always just about to happen.) Certainly whatever it is that assails us through what we call our memory is not something that no longer exists. Whatever happened in the past cannot cease to exist, even if we somehow manage to shrug our contact with it. Certainly whatever it is that we call literature, or story, exists perpetually outside the usual tenses we impose upon ourselves for shallowly practical reasons. For some reason, although often composed in the past tense, a story clutches us in a perpetual now, endlessly accessible but itself unaffected by our access. Richard Flanagan’s remarkable book Question 7 is an interrogation of the ways he has responded, voluntarily or otherwise, or could perhaps respond, to the elements of his life that have affected him through experience or memory, that are affecting him now through experience or memory, and will always affect him, it seems, through experience or memory. Some of these elements are undeniably traumas in themselves: his near-drowning in a whitewater canoeing accident, or the enslavement of his father as a prisoner of war and the nuclear bombs that marked a new access of death and yet saved his father’s life, enabling the author to be conceived; and yet it is not only the traumatic and the dramatic that persist in the fourth tense: small, subtle, beautiful, and tender moments also always exist outside our transactional notions of time. How do all these evers make the experience of our life, and how do these experiences make literature? Flanagan’s writing loops and roves around the unassimilable aspects of his life, returning and returning to the key elements and yet never resolving or anaesthetising them. He writes of his grandmother Mate withstanding the taunts of the baker’s children about her family’s convict heritage: “Mate sat in the dray, eyes averted from the dust kicking up behind it and the baker’s children running alongside. She sat in the dray, she sits in the dray, and even now, long after her death, she is sitting there still, straight, looking past them and towards the future, reinventing herself by reinventing her past, not knowing the past stays with us, that was was, is and shall be, as the baker’s children chant, Crawlers … crawlers, through time and space haunting her and haunting Tom and haunting us all, unable to be unheard: Crawlers … crawlers … crawlers.” Later he writes, “Though it happened then it's still happening now and 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. Life is always happening and has happened and will happen, and the only writing that can ever have any worth confounds time and stands outside of it, swims with it and flies with it and dives deep within it…” I wonder, though, is it literature’s purpose to communicate experience and perpetuate it and explore it, as we like to think, or to neutralise, at least a bit, the threat that experience has for us, a threat that could seem for us an unwithstandable threat were we not able withstand it by the articulation of an ersatz version of this experience, a story, a representation that stands in for the experience and provides at least some relief from the clutch that experience has upon us, an editable representation even, a replacement that brings the details of our lives in from the raw and the wild, into the safer mundane refuge within the pale of grammar? And does not memory perhaps work similarly? Do we not replace experience by an account at least to ourselves of this experience, and replace this account with an account of the account and so forth, until all we have is a little story, an artefact, a tame work, that we could as easily forget as remember? Do we crave nothing more than anaesthesia? Whatever process is occurring, Question 7 is a compelling account of the author grappling with the elements of the past, so to call it, that press themselves so forcefully against him. If he survives this pressure, what will he become and how will these elements arrange themselves around him in whatever form he allows or compels them to resolve? For those who write, writing is both the arena and the product of the assimilation of experience, whatever this does to experience itself. After a period of mystical dissolution in the Tasmanian wilderness that followed his drowning, Flanagan returned to the world of the partial and the incomplete, the world of entities and fracture, the practical world, the world of human congress: “Somehow the confusion, the falseness, the incomprehension not only of others but of myself, and all the pain that these things brought, somehow this was also the very condition of living that would soon return.” That’s life.