'Question 7' by Richard Flanagan

Because I am going to say a few negative things about this book, and to do so at some length, I want to start by stating unequivocally that (a) it is brilliant in most respects, (b) that I enjoyed reading it, (c) that it made me think and question my thoughts and values in good ways, and (d) that the writing is extraordinarily impressive.

It is a memoir of sorts, but is very unconventional and much of it is best characterised as history writing, with a dash of fiction inserted here and there, and plenty of political philosophy too. Family history mingles with broader international and Tasmanian history. It is thus highly original and a deserved winner of the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Richard Flanagan is the only person to have won both this prize and the Booker Prize (for his novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' in 2014). He was born in 1961 in Tasmania, where he still lives.

The title - Question 7 - needs some explanation. It comes, I gather, from a short story by Anton Chekhov called 'Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician' in which a test in which six puzzle-like questions are succeeded by a seventh which is more philosophical and hard to answer, namely: why do people live, suffer, love, and die when none of it can be rationally explained or justified?

A good deal of the book is concerned, if sometimes obliquely, with explaining what happened historically that allowed Richard Flanagan to be born in the first place. His father was a PoW of the Japanese in the Second World War, and he was in Japan being worked slowly to death as a slave labourer when the war was brought to a swift end in August 1945 by the dropping of the two devastating nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These killed hundreds of thousands of people, but allowed Mr Flanagan to live and return to Australia, to marry and have his family.

The narrative then moves about in time, focusing first on the affair between H G Wells and Rebecca West which led - in Flanagan's telling in a rather tangential and not wholly compelling manner - to Wells publishing a novel in 1914 called 'The World Set Free' in which he speculates on the possibility that nuclear weapons could soon be invented. This book was then read by a Hungarian scientist called Leó Szilárd (pronounced see-light) when he was living in exile in London in 1933. That experience, along apparently with watching some traffic lights on Southampton Row change colour, led to the invention of the atomic bomb. It is all quite complicated, but the story is told beautifully.

Later sections focus on the plight of aboriginal peoples in Tasmania whose lands were confiscated by mainly British settlers and soldiers in the first half of the nineteenth century, leading to massacres, expulsions and the destruction of their culture. This, in Flanagan's eyes, amounted to a genocide.

In addition to these historical narratives, Question 7 discusses Richard Flanagan's own family history (mainly Irish, some convict and some possible aboriginal roots too, his grandparents and parents. He also weaves in his own childhood memories and, at the end the story of a terrifying incident in is twenties when he nearly drowned when kayaking on a river. It was a near-death experience and he describes it both grippingly and thoughtfully. He also describes a trip he made to Japan at which he met former guards who treated PoWs with cruelty.

The passage that I found very hard to read and which made me really quite angry relates to the two years Richard Flanagan spent living in Britain in the 1980s when he studied history at Worcester College in Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He clearly disliked this experience a great deal, but as someone who was also studying history in Oxford at that same time, I felt, to put it mildly, that he writes about it with knowing unfairness and (I think) some malice.

He accuses Oxford (rather generically) of hating him, but I think the reverse is true. He has cherry picked incidents in the manner of a scandal-mongering tabloid journalist, and bunged them all together without context to mislead his readers. Any old fool can do that. I could easily do the same thing was I minded to in respect of - let's say for the sake of argument - Australia. It is a country I adore and which I first visited in the 1980s, but it was not and still is not a haven filled with liberal intellectuals. It would be easy to assemble a bunch of disobliging quotes overheard in a bar there, and to put them altogether to suggest the whole country is full of racist, sexist monsters. This is what Flanagan does in respect of Oxford.

He also clearly found Britain generally to be an appalling place. He has absolutely nothing pleasant to say about us at all, even going as far to omit any mention of second world war casualties in the UK when he writes about the number of people killed by bombs in most other countries. I am going to quote him in full here so as not to be accused of being unfairly selective:

I searched for what might sustain me. That proved not to be London, which I found an alluring promise often made but rarely kept. I sought some wild country to escape the claustrophobia, some larger world.

There was nothing. The rivers were sewers no one found unusual, the sky a haze of fine smog no one any longer saw obscuring the mid and far distance. There was a long-ago poisoned land, domesticated and dead, full of the sounds of diesel and the odour of chemicals, that people nevertheless regarded as bucolic and Edenic. Agri-business, highways, signs, industrial noise, a weeping urban mestasising into something that brought on only the impulse to flee.

There was no light there, no largeness.

No one noticed anything because no one any longer knew all that was irretrievably lost. No one saw that the paintings of Turner used a different palette for the sun to depict its original light in lemon yellows and delicate hues of pink and coral in a time before that too was lost, refracted through the growing pollution into apocalyptic reds. A general numbness prevailed. The world there was grey, the world seemed petrified by its own collapse, at once dreary and dispirited, rectangle after warehouse after polytube, its cultivated and domestic symmetries endless.

On Oxford itself he says this:

My first Oxford supervisor, a celebrated left-wing historian, on learning I had published a book of Australian history, asked what history Australia has, what culture. He was smiling. It was a statement, not a question, the implication clear. Not a block away stood a long house full of one of the biggest collections of stolen heads in the world, the Pitt Rivers Museum, among which were Tasmanian heads.

'Women smell like slime, don't you think', a fellow student told me, also not a question. Women had only been admitted to my college a few years before I arrived. In an Indian restaurant on the Broad, they confidently called for service: 'Hey Paki - oi! You filthy black cunt, here!' 'Go home to the colonies, convict', my second Oxford supervisor wrote at the bottom of one of my essays. 'This is feminism gone lunatic.'

I worried it was me, a failing I could not name, some absence, something fundamental I did not have and which those all around me who were so assured did. Perhaps it was so, I thought. Perhaps I was less.

Then this:

At my Oxford college, where mediocrity was a virtue called tradition, there was a law don regarded as uncharacteristically brilliant. I had assumed from his implausible upper class accent, all Germanic ho-kay ya and choppy rhythms, to his baggy cords and tweeds and old fogeyish deportment, that he too was a Martian. But they knew who he really was. They had always known. They called him what he was, his torment, his inescapable origin, for he was as everyone said behind his back, as the matter of fact and truth it undoubtedly was to them: the dirty little East End Jew. He would have been better with no home and two bags always packed, ready to leave for the next country.

It is a grossly unfair characterisation. The term 'Martian' is used here pejoratively and generically to refer to the spiritual (if not the actual) descendants of those who built the British Empire - including Australia of course.

In fact, Oxford in the 1980s was a rather liberal and left-leaning place full of decent people who would never talk in this manner and would be appalled to hear such language. Flanagan knows that, but has chosen invective rather than balance or fairness. He misleads quite deliberately.

He avoids naming names until he discusses a very thinly disguised Boris Johnson in a appallingly unfair manner, suggesting as many try to do (with knowing dishonesty) that the members of the Bullingdon Club paraded about the city's streets in the 1980s and hired prostitutes to entertain them:

Meanwhile the Bullers wandered the Oxford streets, dressed absurdly as themselves or offensively as Nazis and after dinner had the whores in. The Buller B- who would be prime minister wanted me to be his wingman when he ran a second time for Oxford Union president, one more whore. I told him I couldn't stand the Union, that I wasn't even a member, and why, in any case, would I bother? B- said when I ran he would help me if I helped him and so I repeated my original answer and B- fif-faf-fuddled because he really had no answer, no one did, he was charming and you couldn't believe a thing he said, it was good, it was the best, it was inescapable: I could play the Australian berserk, or I could pretend to be a Martian - but, of course, the Martians always knew who you really were. It was their method. It was their penal colony. I can see now that they were also, in their incomprehensible, terrifying certainty that was so pure it was almost a form of innocence, true Martians.

Revolting and wrong. He is here giving a grossly inaccurate impression of a time and place.

This is only a very small part of the book, but it spoiled the reading experience for me and naturally made me question the accuracy of everything else he writes. I have dwelt on it here because it needed calling out.

I would still recommend 'Question 7' and consider it, in all other respects, to be a most impressive piece of literary non-fiction. He writes beautifully, weaves a myriad of fascinating stories together and is consistently thought-provoking too.