It is not often that a book forces you to put it down repeatedly because you feel shaky. Question 7 did that to me. It is that good.
Richard Flanagan is one of Australia’s leading novelists. He won the Booker prize in 2014 for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. This is a work of non-fiction — you might call it an experimental memoir — but it has all the complexity and emotional heft of a great novel.
It proceeds from an unsettling thought. If the US had not dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima then Flanagan’s father, who was at that moment close to death as a Japanese PoW, would have been unlikely to survive the war. In which case, Flanagan would not have been born.
Working backwards from there, Flanagan describes how the physicist Leo Szilard suddenly conceived the idea of the nuclear chain reaction, and how he was inspired by an HG Wells novel, which first imagined an “atomic bomb” (Wells coined the term) that could destroy a city. And how Wells was inspired in turn because he had been reading a book about radium at the moment he met the writer Rebecca West, from whose somewhat terrifying passion he ran away to write “a book in which everything burns”.
Flanagan weaves these stories together with what feel like flashbulb memories in the mind of someone suffering from PTSD — incidents and moments from history recalled and replayed. Bombardier Thomas Ferebee releasing “Little Boy” over Hiroshima, and the vaporised dead passing through his body. Wells and West’s passionate kiss. Szilard’s flash of inspiration as he waits at traffic lights on Southampton Row, and his later desperate attempts to prevent the atomic bomb being used. Flanagan’s encounter, in Japan, with a notorious former camp commandant, once known as The Lizard. Flanagan asked him to slap him in the face, as hard as he can, like he slapped PoWs. At the third slap, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake hit Tokyo. Afterwards the man gave Flanagan $20 in an envelope, to give to his father.
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Even the relatively conventional memoir material is far from ordinary. Flanagan’s father emerged from his horrific war experiences “for the most part vaporous”. His grandmother, in old age, “would make her way to the toilet on stick-like legs, hunched like an aged plover, bearing the chamber pot she kept under her bed, a towel over its indignity”. There is a bravura extended passage on his ageing mother’s hands, which culminates in her breaking down and apologising for hitting her son. “Tears in the old do not roll,” Flanagan writes, “they catch and stall in the lines and furrows of the face, spot-glossing the price paid for time.”
Underpinning the book is the idea that past, present and future coexist. This makes sense of Flanagan’s blending of history and memories, and his evocation of Hiroshima as “the great tragedy of our age from which we continue to seek understanding and yet can never understand”.
It makes sense too of Flanagan’s extraordinary stories of his Tasmanian childhood, and how the island’s present is stained and shaped by its history of genocide, slavery and environmental devastation. He describes enslaved convicts pissing through penitentiary floorboards on to Aboriginal people corralled beneath. He describes his parents driving along a new road in 1963, “a muddy track slashing a seemingly negligible gash” through the rainforest, which “seems at first the merest scratch, a slight wound that will quickly heal over, rather than what it is, the beginning of something gangrenous and fatal”. His parents see a Tasmanian tiger crossing the road — a creature officially declared extinct in 1982. “I was born into the autumn of things,” Flanagan comments, with as much fury as sadness. And those qualities make this a deeply uncomfortable read. British readers especially may squirm. It is not just the anti-imperialism. He calls the English countryside “a long-ago poisoned land, domesticated and dead”.
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What seems to motivate the book, ultimately, is survivor’s guilt. At the end Flanagan tells the extraordinary, white-knuckle story of how, aged 21, he almost died when his kayak became wedged underneath a white-water rapid. For hours. “To call for my mother would have been the end,” he writes — recalling his description, 150 pages before, of the survivors of Hiroshima. “Mother, they kept saying as charred skin fell like long strands of kelp off their bodies and heads, mother.”
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Memoir is fashionable just now. Question 7 sets the high-water mark for what the genre can be.
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan (Chatto & Windus £18.99 pp280). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
