Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

Yes.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.

This is exactly the kind of thing that I absolutely adore.

A kinda sad, serious, person recounting kinda sad, serious things in a way that foregrounds the importance of literature and culture over all other things (perhaps)…

Richard Flanagan – who you’ve likely heard of as the author of the hugely-acclaimed and expensively-adapted The Narrow Road To The Deep North (which I haven’t read, but soon will) – takes readers here on a wild, harrowing, serious (yes, I’ve said it again), entertaining and complex journey through his own and his family’s and Tasmania’s pasts, and also through the significant pasts of the wider world, drilling down into individual people and individual texts that (he convincingly argues) may hold far more responsibility for the contemporary world than they are often deemed to have…

We are given imagined scenes from the romance of H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, we see a young physicist who – inspired by a late and unloved H.G. Wells novel – comes up with the idea of atomic chain reactions, who later becomes involved in the Manhattan Project (remember from that movie Barbenheimer?) and then becomes an (unsuccessful) advocate against nuclear proliferation after the Bomb exists…

We see the crew of the Enola Gay dropping their bomb onto Hiroshima, we see the genocide perpetrated by the English against the indigenous population of Tasmania, we see ecological destruction, we see the time Flanagan’s father spent as a POW and slave labourer at a mine in Japan during the Second World War and we see Flanagan, many decades later and already an internationally-known novelist – visit the site of the mine and make polite conversation with the extremely old surviving prison guards and the locals who claim (or have) no knowledge of the forced labour, violent punishments and brutal executions that took place there a lifetime ago…

Flanagan tells us about nearly drowning as a young man (an episode whose full details are held back until the very end of the book and are riveting, horrifying, terrifying), he tells us about studying in Oxford as an Australian youth with a scholarship and the stream of snobbery, xenophobia and misogyny he witnessed…

There’s one moment which jars, when Flanagan makes some kind of sneering Boomerish aside about cancel culture, which would maybe have more resonance in a book that wasn’t, ultimately, about as “woke” as writing can be: Question 7 is a text that is explicitly anti-genocide, anti-slavery, anti-ecological destruction, anti-classism, anti-totalitarianism, anti historical revisionism, anti-nuclear war, pro-eduction, pro-communication, pro-literature, pro-culture… Flanagan is clearly not a bitter, angry loser shaking fists at clouds… He’s a master at work, deftly weaving together disparate ideas that create a patchwork whole that satisfies, deeply, warmly, coherently, without patronisingly linking everything in a faux epiphany.

In many ways it reminded me of Jenn Ashworth’s Notes Made While Falling, which is the best thing I’ve read in a long while… This book, though, isn’t quite as intense and is much more international…

–///–

One sentence hit me, hard, a little over halfway through. On p. 162 Flanagan writes “the words of a book are never the book, the soul of it is everything.”

I think few things have quite captured my thoughts about literature… So much of what is said by a text exists beyond what and how something is being said. Meaning is more complex, more nebulous than merely what the words say or what the words don’t say but imply…

A book has a soul, yes. A book has something in its heart that you can see, you can always see, as a reader, and when that soul is vapid, it screams from every page. When that soul is glorious, is human and reverberant and potent and large… Oh, it sings at you. It sings at you. Question 7 is a book with a soul that sings.

–///–

Inside Question 7 is truth and beauty and mystery and art…

This is a book about artifice and creativity, about fact and feeling, about emotion and intellect… Politics and poetry. Life and death. Nostalgia and regret. War and Peace (the ideas not the book). It’s fucking got it all.

Maybe I’m gushing as I’ve read a few mediocre things recently. But maybe not. Maybe Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is just, unignorably, absolutely fucking brilliant. 

The Narrow Road To The Deep North has just shot up my reading list. Yes. Yes it has…