In the middle of a chain reaction: 'Question 7' by Richard Flanagan – Book Recommendation

Question 7 is an unusual memoir, ruminative and exquisitely written, comprising reflections and recollections ranging from the intensely personal to the far-reaching consequences of human actions and interactions.

The memoir initially appears to flit rather randomly between seemingly unrelated locations, events, and episodes in different people’s lives. However, Flanagan draws together ostensibly disparate histories to demonstrate a sort of consequential butterfly effect applicable to everyone and everything and therefore valid to both an individual’s story and that of the world. The author relates his own near-death experience as a young man and memories of his Tasmanian upbringing by way of exploring how a love affair between literary figures H. G. Wells and Rebecca West led to the production of a text that generated a spark of thought in a scientist, begetting the atom bomb and immense devastation. Family and world history collide as the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb saves the life of Flanagan’s father, who in 1945 was a prisoner and slave labourer in Japan. Flanagan also reflects on and laments the annihilation of Tasmania’s Aboriginal population, along with much of the island’s natural environment. Events of the past, many of them huge and horrendous, intersect with the tender minutiae and immediacy of family life. This is less jarring than one might expect, with much focus given to the intricate relationships between creation and destruction and the individual and the collective.

Flanagan’s observations meld known facts with imaginative sequences, perhaps highlighting the fragmentary and unreliable nature of memory. Accordingly, the memoir reads not as a sequential account of a life. Instead, it brings together the kind of salient recollections and fancy that form for each of us the impression of a life much more potent than its prosaic reality. Question 7 is an attempt to understand oneself and the wider world and how the two things interrelate. Flanagan derives his title from the seventh of Chekhov’s eight ‘Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician’, dating from 1882, all of which are illogical and entirely without resolution. I think this is Flanagan’s point, really, that in life, with all its peculiarities, fragile connections, love and loathing, horror and wonder, there are no final answers.

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan ISBN: 9781784745677