Question 7

 

If didn’t find Question 7 as engaging as Flanagan’s works of fiction, I blame myself. I read the book in snippets in the evening and didn’t grasp the connections and flow between fiction and autobiography as might have if I had read more continuously. There is also a feeling that a fiction writer doesn’t have to share the true stories behind the invented stories (here in particular, The River Guide and The Narrow Road to the Deep North). Perhaps I mean, I’d prefer they didn’t.

Others think differently, and the book has achieved high critical acclaim. In her Guardian review, Tara June Winch writes:

Question 7 is Flanagan’s finest book. It is a treatise on the immeasurability of life, reminiscent of the Japanese tradition of mono no aware, the psychological and philosophical sweep of Tolstoy, and enmeshed in a personal essay that is tuned as finely as WG Sebald’s Rings of Saturn.

In his Conversation piece, Dan Dixon provides a justification for Flanagan’s desire to lift the curtain on the true experiences behind the art:

The formal experimentation appears to derive from Flanagan’s anxiety that autobiography is necessarily fictitious. The desire to document one’s life accurately, he suggests, is made foolish by the ephemerality of language, the unreliability of memory, and the unaccountable contingencies of history.

There you have it. A fine work; autofiction by necessity.

Question 7 explores the life of a writer (a famous one), the intersections between history and the writer’s life, and a near-death experience that haunts the writer as profoundly as his father’s suffering as a Japanese prisoner of war, and the fate of Tasmania’s Indigenous people.

It opens with Flanagan’s visit to Japan and Flanagan meeting two of his father’s former guards (one of whose evil needs are notorious). Flanagan then speculates on the origins of the atomic bomb as the war's end. Well before the Manhattan Project, H.G. Wells had inspired physicist Leo Szilard’s conceptual breakthrough. In this manner, Flanagan tells stories of writers and scientists, as they intersect with the ‘I’ of the text -- the human moments that connect momentous events to their authors.

The kiss mentioned here is H. G. and the youthful Rebecca West:

That kiss would, in time, beget death which would, in turn, beget me and the circumstances of my life that lead to the book you now hold, a chain reaction which began over a century ago, and all of which will lead to the unlikely figure of my father, unlikely in that he is to appear in a story with, among others unknown to him, H.G. wells and Rebecca West (p. 37).

These ideas resonate throughout the novel, so that H.G. Wells references, which begin with the sensation of scandal, deepen with time. Wells had compared the invasion of Martians in War of the Worlds to the genocide of Tasmanian Aboriginals. Flanagan, in one remarkable passage, takes on some essential premises of post-colonial theory and raises some uncomfortable questions about the convict origins of the colonial period. To quote just a section,

Tasmania does not begin with a monolithic group of Martians invading and Europeans uniformly benefiting from the conquest. The Martians were the rulers and everyone else the ruled. The term settler-colonial society is lazy thinking that hides the inequality on which the new Martian world was built and the pathologies that flow from it, which run deeply to this day (p. 224).

Flanagan makes a reasoned argument for seeing the convicts as a slave class, and a kind of ‘reverse indigenisation’ in which freed convicts and their families ‘took on some of the values and mentality of Aboriginal people’ (p. 225). This is likely a contentious idea but one I believe made with the intention of waking Australians from a complacency in how they (we) view history, place and identity. 

Peter Carey has written that ‘Question 7 may just be the most significant work of Australian art in the last hundred years.’ As a double Booker-prize winner and a deep thinker about Australian history and culture, he is worth listening to. It looks like I need to read Question 7 a second time, this time in two or three sittings, with a pen in hand.