One of the most praised books, at least by reviewers, in 2023 was ‘Question 7’ by Richard Flanagan [1]. A year later, well two years later if I am strict about this, I got round to reading it.
It is a difficult book to describe [2]. It is in the main a memoir and family history and Flanagan includes the story of his father’s internment in Japan during the second world war [3] and writes warmly of the resilience of his mother in bringing up five children and caring for a war-damaged husband. But the book is also a reflection on wider events including the genocide of Aboriginal people in Tasmania and, in a further change of direction, an imaginative retelling of what might have taken place in the affair between the writers HG Wells and Rebecca West. This relationship was fascinating (and to the modern mind baffling) but it is not clear why Flanagan is telling us about this. However, it makes better sense when you realise that Wells’s book ‘The World Set Free’ foresaw the possibility of nuclear fusion (as described by Frederick Soddy with Ernest Rutherford). Flanagan relates how the idea of nuclear fusion caught the imagination of many, including Churchill, and became an obsession for Leo Szilard, a freelance scientist, who became influential in the Manhattan project [4] and the development of the atom bomb. The bomb was first released over Hiroshima, something also described in the book. The story of the bomb ends up linking with his family memoir as his father was a prisoner of war (or more accurately a slave labourer) in Japan and almost certainly about to die. He was only saved by the dropping of the bomb and the subsequent surrender of Japan.
Apart from its literary merits, which others have talked about, I found the book intriguing in respect to the questions it indirectly asks about social research. There is a strong move, in some fields at least, towards counting and modelling, making use of the vast of amounts of digital data available to social scientists. Indeed, so much of what I read and review places excessive trust in what can be measured and assumes that there is regularity in people’s actions. Books like Flanagan’s should be read by social researchers as they suggest that human behaviour is not predictable or easy to explain. Why is this? Well, one reason is that the past is not easily accessible; what we might once have believed was significant can turn out to be less so in time and vice versa. Moreover, any meaning we attach to an event will change through thinking about it; we do not remember the experience but an imperfect and unstable memory of that experience. As Flanagan puts it ‘experience is but a moment, making sense of that moment is life’ (Flanagan, 2023, 45). As an example, towards the very end of the book he ends with a very arresting description of the day he ‘died’ – this concerned an accident when he was trapped for hours in a kayak and surrounded by jagged rocks and faced by a raging torrent of water. Eventually a colleague managed to get to him but found it impossible to release him. Both Flanagan and his would-be rescuer were cold, wet and spent and Flanagan had repeated sensations of leaving his body and a sense that his life was over. (The description of the episode is in fact worth the price of the book itself). Life changing as this incident was (after all he ‘died’) he does not, and cannot, tell exactly what impact it had. We cannot reduce our lives to a simple cause and effect, there is something mysterious about it all, his preferred word is baffling.
This belief that there are no easy answers is reflected in the title ‘Question 7’. As he explains it comes from Anton Chekhov’s parody of a school test problem:
Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?
Who?
You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer? And why do we do what we do to each other?
That’s question 7.
(Flanagan, 2023,24)
The point I think is that we pretend that if we can only classify the facts and process them in the right way then we will know the answers to unanswerable questions. We are wrong.
Flanagan has written a fascinating book, written clearly and accessibly. Critics have described it as beautiful and moving and it is. What I particularly liked is that when the talk comes round to the utter impossibility of explanation in the social sciences we can easily end up in a cul de sac in which nothing should be taken as real and hence nothing matters. In contrast, Flanagan is baffled but you can tell this business of life and living matters very much to him. He cares about people, something that comes over more powerfully as his authorial voice is understated. He cares about the hard lives his parents had, he cares about the enslaving and killing of aboriginal peoples, he cares about the threat to the fauna and flora of his native Tasmania, and he cares about the ever present threat of nuclear destruction. As he puts it there are no agreed answers to the question ‘why we do what we do?’ but it is a question that needs constantly asking.
Notes
[1] Flanagan, R. (2023) Question 7, Penguin: London.
[2] All reviews I have read praise the book as well as noting that it crosses different genres. Some examples are:
Dirda, M. (2024) ‘Richard Flanagan’s brilliant ‘Question 7’ defies categorization’,
Washington Post, September 11, 2024 [online]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/09/11/richard-flanagan-question-7-review/
Dixon, D. (2023) ‘The atomic bomb and a near-death experience shadow Richard Flanagan’s autobiographical Question 7’, The Conversation [Online]
Power, C. (2024) ‘A family history bound to the story of the atom bomb’, New York Times. 15 September 2024 [online]
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/15/books/review/richard-flanagan-question-7.html
Preston, A. (2024) ‘Question 7 by Richard Flanagan review – the Booker winner’s beautiful, unclassifiable memoir-cum-novel’, The Observer, 27 May 2024 [online]
Winch, T.J. (2023) ‘Question 7 by Richard Flanagan review – this deeply moving book is his finest work’, Guardian, 2 November 2023 [online]
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/02/question-7-by-richard-flanagan-book-review
[3] This he covered in depth in his Booker prize winning novel: Flanagan, R. (2013) The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Vintage: London.
[4] Leo Szilard’s biography can be found in usual sites though I enjoyed this reflection by Lisa Jardine: Jardine, J. (2013) ‘A Point of View: The man who dreamed of the atom bomb, BBC, 4 October 2013. [online] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24395740
Michael Hammond 