Question 7

"Crystalline and poetic, philosophical and evocative, each short section of such brilliance it demands being savored and read over and over again."

Richard Flanagan has done so much more than write a personal memoir in his new book, Question 7. He's written a memoir of our time, of how individual lives and historic events intersect and amplify each other. Much like the butterfly effect that describes how small changes can have immense consequences, Flanagan shows how the past continues to reverberate through each of us. His writing is crystalline and poetic, philosophical and evocative, each short section of such brilliance it demands being savored and read over and over again.

Some sections are ruminative in tone: "Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings—why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life in the hope that behind it we will find the truth of the why.

“But there is not truth. There is only why. And when we look closer we see that behind that why is just another tapestry.

“And behind it another, and another, until we arrive at oblivion."

Others are more personal, particularly the ones about his father's time as a prisoner of war during WWII. One of the threads in Flanagan's tapestry is his trip to Japan, visiting the mine where his father worked and suffered, meeting some of the guards and people who almost killed him. The contrast between Flanagan's present and his father's past is one of the most jarring whys of the book:

"At the mine entrance, where my father and his fellow slave labourers once ran the gauntlet of guards who beat them as they passed, there now now stood a love hotel. There was no memorial, no sign, no evidence, in other words, that whatever had once happened had ever happened. . . . As if the need to forget is as strong as the need to remember. Perhaps stronger."

Yet others are historic, such as those about the atomic bomb, from H.G. Wells’ imagining it in a novel to the physicist Leo Szilard working to make Wells’ book come true to the final detonation over Hiroshima. Another thread is the history of Tasmania, of the brutal slaughter of the native people who lived there and the convict society the British created in their place. Yet another is the craft of the writer, the use of language, the role of heretic.

All these strands are magnificently woven into a complex fabric that seems magically effortless. The whole is an incredibly unique book, part memoir, part history, part philosophy, part aesthetic credo. Reading these pages is a reminder of the gift great literature gives us. That may truly be the answer to the question that echoes throughout the book, Question 7 or "who loves more." Writers and readers do, as this work proves.