By Canon Mike D Williams
Richard Flanagan invites readers to navigate the shifting terrain of memory and identity, exploring how the stories we inherit and the questions we ask shape our lives. At the heart of the book is a meditation on war – not just a historical event but a reality that passes down through generations. It is a powerful memoir as we remember the end of World War Two 80 years ago.
Flanagan’s father was one of 32,000 Japanese prisoners of war in 1945 expected to die if the Allied invasion of Japan went ahead. He worked down a mine as a slave labourer near Hiroshima. What would have happened to his father if the bomb had not been dropped? Did it save his life? Richard visits where his father had been kept prisoner. There he meets a former guard and wonders about the possibility of redemption. Locals have no memory of the internment camp or the slave labourers. The horrors of war are neither romanticised nor diminished; instead, they are presented as part of the fabric of experience that impacts the future.
A renowned Australian writer of fiction, Flanagan’s story-telling ability is evident as threads are woven into a complex memoir. Although classed as non-fiction, the literary hybrid style makes it an unusual read. He reaches back in time to the fictional work of H G Wells who imagined nuclear fusion in a work of fiction, which inspired a physicist Leo Szilard, who persuaded Einstein to lobby President Roosevelt, who commissioned the Manhattan Project. Then the bomb became a reality changing the war and lives of countless families. It is a book about questions – questions you cannot answer due to the complexity of human experience. The book’s title refers to an obscure story by Chekhov in which ‘question seven’ is a nonsense unanswerable question.
The fragmented structure of the book mirrors the snapshots of our memory – vignettes move between time, place and subject. The characters behind the development of nuclear fusion, the crew of the B52 plane who dropped the bomb, Rebecca West, the lover of H G Wells that caused him to run off to Switzerland where he wrote his book that inspired another mind to invent nuclear fusion. A chain of events that weave together to the point where Flanagan writes this book as a ‘love note’, he says, to his parents and his Tasmanian homeland.
The final section of the book is very different, as Flanagan draws the conclusion that, without the bomb being dropped, his father would not have survived another winter. Without his father he would not have existed. And then, at the age of 21, his life nearly ends in the Franklin River, trapped in a kayak under a torrent of water. Saved but badly injured he wrote his first novel to exorcise what had happened. Glad to be alive, but still with many questions and memories of his father and mother.