by Adele A. Wilby
The Australian author Richard Flanagan is the 2024 winner of the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction for his book Question 7. The book is a brilliant weaving together of memory, history, of fact and fiction, love and death around the theme of interconnectedness of events that constitute his life. Disparate connections between his father’s experience as a prisoner of war, the author H.G. Wells, and the atomic bomb all contributed towards making Flanagan the thinker and writer he is today. The book reveals to us his humanity, his love of family and of his home island of Tasmania; it is what Flanagan expects of a book when he says, ‘the words of a book are never the book, the soul is everything’, and this book has ‘soul’.
The book opens with Flanagan visiting the site of Ohama Camp where his father was interned as a slave labourer in the undersea coal mines in Japan during World War II. There is ‘no memorial, no sign, no evidence’ of the camp or the suffering that existed on that spot; all that remains is a ‘love hotel’, but his visit to this site establishes the first link in a chain of interconnected events in his life.
Flanagan’s father never expected to survive the cruelty of the guards and the grinding work as a slave labourer in the coal mines, yet faraway in Europe, unbeknown to him, scientific minds were actively working on the idea of a bomb with extraordinary lethal potential, a bomb that would save his life and have a profound impact on the future of humanity and shape world events. The Japanese city of Hiroshima became the experimental testing ground for this atomic bomb and tens of thousands of ‘unknown souls’ perished, ‘vaporised’, by the force of the energy of such a lethal weapon. The atomic bomb brought the war to an end, saved Flanagan’s father’s life and ultimately brought Flanagan himself into existence.
Nevertheless, the number of dead and the extent of the destruction caused by the bomb’s explosive power raise many moral questions for Flanagan. He asks, ‘do possibly more corpses tomorrow justify possibly fewer corpses today?’ In his view, the ‘elusiveness of those innumerable unknown souls…exist outside of numbers’. As he says, ‘we pretend there is a moral calculus in war’ but we know from past and present theatres of war, we do only ‘pretend’: Morality, like truth, is one of the first casualties of war. Flanagan though is sceptical of attempts to quantify the number of dead following the dropping of the atomic bomb and the quantification of human life more broadly. In a philosophical reflection he comments, ‘we have become prisoners of the idea that life is infinitely measurable, that all human wanting and torment and laughter, all hate, and all love can be reduced to metrics’ (italics in original).
When meditating on these modern tendencies and moral dilemmas, Flanagan turns to the literature of the Russian author Chekov, who parodies a mathematical exam question, question 7, asking children to both calculate the calculable and to find a solution to the incalculable question, ‘who loves longer, a man or a woman?’ There is of course no answer to such a question and Chekov doesn’t hazard one, but this confounding question does challenge what we presume to be known and implies that beneath the known there is another reality. Flanagan responds to question 7 not with an answer, but with his own perplexing questions about who loves longer, ‘you, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer?’, the inference here being that one question always raises another, perhaps a deeper question, and unlike mathematics, there is no clear answer to such a question. He then asks, ‘And why do we do what we do to each other?’ another moral question that defies a definitive answer and one of the truly moral questions of all time, particularly when, as Flanagan points out further on in the book, none of us is exempt from causing harm. On the contrary, in one way or another we are all connected to acts of inhumanity which will eventually reveal themselves if we just continue to ask the questions, and this is also another of Flanagan’s themes in the book. He urges the constant asking of questions to open new worlds to reveal new truths, and in that process, we learn more about who we really are and our depth of complicity in the harmful events of the world.
Having introduced the initial link in the chain of events between his father’s life and the atomic bomb, Flanagan momentarily confounds the reader when he shifts from memory and history with his visit to Japan, to a biographical event of over a century ago: a mundane happening in faraway England becomes a significant link in the chain of events that saved his father’s life, but ended the lives of thousands of others. It all starts with that most basic of human responses, physical attraction, in this case the ‘irresistible attraction’ between two renowned nineteenth century authors, H.G Wells and Rebecca West. In a bid to free himself from that powerful impulse, Wells flees to Switzerland where he begins his new novel, The World Set Free. This literary work was to have an unintended profound impact on the world: It planted the seeds for a radical understanding of the potential for the ‘the military application of scientists’ discoveries about radium in a new weapon of unimaginable power’ in the mind of physicist, Leo Szilard. The ‘chain of events’ that followed Szilard’s initial insights escalated and when finally realised, this ‘unimaginable power’ manifest in a mushroom cloud spiralling miles into the atmosphere with tens of thousands of people below cruelly dying in a cauldron of ‘bubbling molasses’ that ‘just kept boiling up’.
Flanagan’s linking of connections between Wells’ book, the atomic bomb and his father’s life might seem a little grandiose, but they are nonetheless real events. The chain of events impacted on his father, and he became ‘an alone man’ but a man with a deep sense of humanity, a man who, ‘at the heart of his gentleness was the feeling that without kindness we are nothing’. His family’s attitude to money also was that of ‘realists, not idealists’, money was for his family ‘an aspect of the world but not the point of it’.
Perhaps it is this strong sense of humanity embodied in his family values that nurtured Flanagan’s love of the Tasmanian natural environment also. He writes passionately about the period of British colonialism that set in motion the destruction of the Tasmanian environment and rainforest and perpetrated the genocide of the Aboriginal people, and once again Wells’ science fiction comes into play.
In Wells’ The War of the Worlds the Martians invade the Earth with ‘extreme violence’, an idea that has its genesis in a conversation between Wells and his brother who remarked that European settlement in Tasmania was a ‘frightful disaster for the native Tasmanians’. Wells makes the connection between his brother’s view and the theme in the book clear when he comments ‘…the Tasmanians …were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years’. To put it in more contemporary terms, Wells was one of the first to acknowledge that the British ‘invasion’ of Tasmania resulted in the genocide of the indigenous Aboriginal people.
The reader feels Flanagan’s passion on this issue, or, if the reader prefers, his outrage, towards that brutality and destruction by the British in the island when he metaphorically refers to Wells’ idea of violent ‘Martians’ to convey just how the British were ‘alien’ intruders, bringing with them a totally different culture to that of the Aboriginal people and their way of life. As he comments, the ‘pale invaders’ must have seemed to the Tasmanian Aboriginal people ‘as ephemeral as they had at first thought’ but rather than being ephemeral ‘they didn’t leave. They kept coming…’ perpetrating their violence and imposing an ‘alien’ lifestyle until such time the Aboriginal people and their culture were decimated. But there is no use of conceptual niceties such as ‘British colonialism’ in Flanagan’s language to describe the British occupation of Tasmania: he is blunt, and truthful, ‘their island was stolen by the English…and the invasion was a sacrilegious act’. The possessive pronoun ‘their’ could refer to the island and culture the Aboriginal community had known for thousands of years before the English arrived, or it could suggest that he continues to feel that Tasmania still belongs to the Aboriginal community. That ‘the invasion was a sacrilegious act’, emphasises the abhorrence Flanagan feels for the desecration of a unique way of life deeply rooted in a language linked to nature, with its ‘songs, dances, practices, laws, spirits’, a cultural as well as a physical destruction of a people consistent with Ralph Lemkin’s definition of genocide. The ‘empty’ space created by the rapacious British colonialists, Flanagan writes, ‘was at once a war of genocide and the creation of a totalitarian slave society’ where the British, or the violent ‘Martians’ to use Flanagan’s metaphorical characterisation, were the rulers, and everyone else the ruled.
Tragically the British continually attempt to exonerate themselves from the genocide they committed in Tasmania by trying to turn the responsibility for the crime away from the coloniser back onto the colonised, and this too outrages Flanagan, but for reasons that will surprise the reader. Commenting on an article in the English ‘Independent’ as recently as 2009, Flanagan is sarcastic when he says, ‘how marvellous, to have an empire, reap its robbed riches, and yet etch its colonial failings on the colonised, to write on our bodies that we were the vulgar arriviste, the barbarian, the savage, that their judgement was our crime’. But just when the reader feels Flanagan’s resentment borders on an expression of contempt for the British state and the instruments of its power, the newspapers, he pauses and rises above his anger to show his humanity when says, ‘if I weary of the enormous Martian condescension, the endless Martian capacity for patronising, the unquestioned Martian superiority, the unending Martian arrogance that is always founded in an unequal Martian stupidity and unrivalled Martian ignorance, it is not because I think they are uniquely guilty’(Italics added) rather, he says ‘it is because they cannot conceive… that we all are’ (italics added).
Flanagan’s shift to the plural pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’ to describe what can be seen as Aboriginal and freed British convicts’ complicity in the building of a ‘totalitarian slave society’, has two possible explanations. Firstly, he identifies as a descendant of the islanders and therefore the complicity of those communities in the creation of the society during colonial times. On the other hand, rather than casting aspersions on one section of humanity over the another, he implies that all human beings are responsible, either directly or indirectly, for the societies we create and for the happenings in the world today. In Tasmania it was the ‘Martians’, the rulers, who created the system, but it was the ruled who were compelled to engage at every level required for a society to function effectively. ‘We as convicts’, he writes, ‘were made to be our own convict-constable, our own convict hangman…our own convict-clerks, our own convict archivists…recording our own suffering in neatly compiled volume after volume of letters, memoranda…’. And thus it ‘was we who bore the inescapable, ineradicable shame that was not ours and which would always be ours’.
The ‘totalitarian slave society’ that replaced the social structure of the Aboriginal community was embedded with social divisions: racism, misogyny, ‘Martian’ oppression, ideas of supremacy and arrogance, and social class. For Flanagan, when the British were in Tasmania ‘we were a colony of the empire, but after that we were a colony of the mind’. But as he was to realise during his stay in the United Kingdom and when studying at Oxford University, many of those hangovers of the colonial legacy in Tasmania were institutionalised at Oxford University, and again we can feel his humanity and his deep abhorrence at such manifestations and practices. Such was the racist language used by the university students and some academics he came to realise that the language at Oxford was the ‘language of hate’.
Industrialised London also had no charm for him. ‘There was nothing’ he says. ‘Nobody’ he writes, was aware of that ‘nothing’ because, ‘no one any longer knew all that was irretrievably lost’. The reader is left to deduce their own understanding of Flanagan’s reference to what is ‘irretrievably lost’, but we can assume that it was the destruction of the natural environment and the simpler life that walked together with industrialisation. That he longed for ‘some wild country to escape the claustrophobia, some larger world’ when in England suggests his homesickness for life in Tasmania, but it also is a nuanced criticism of industrialisation, or more precisely, capitalism, its impact manifest so clearly in London, where ‘rivers were sewers no one found unusual, the sky a haze of fine smog…Agri-business, highways, signs, industrial noise, a weeping urban sore metastasising into something that brought on only an impulse to flee’, a vivid description that continues to have relevance to the present day.
Flanagan’s love of and relatedness to the natural environment is highlighted in his decision not to accept the £50,000 prize money for his book until the Baillie Gifford sponsors make known their plans to further reduce their involvement in the fossil fuel industry. Echoing his earlier view that we are all complicit in the destruction or creation of our society, he sees this continuing in climate change today. In an interview following the winning of the award and his decision to wait and see the outcome of talks with the Baillie Gifford sponsors, he comments, ‘…I didn’t arrive at it from any position of moral superiority, because we are all complicit: I fly in planes, drive a car, I live surrounded by plastic and I think these matters are extraordinarily complex…’ He writes movingly of the rainforest under threat from climate change, of its ‘intricate, myriad, miraculous relationships the sum of which the Tasmanian rainforest, a precise confusion of tree, fern, moss, fungi and microbe, of animal and bird and inset, fish and invertebrate, that might be better known as an unknown civilisation…’ as ‘old as the dinosaurs’. Over time, capitalism has encroached on this pristine rainforest and the reader can see both his scepticism and criticism of the West’s economics when he asks, ‘if we were to rise above it, above the mountains…would we have been able to see the advancing from another direction Western time(italics in original) – with it insatiable greed and monstrous appetite, Western time with its new machines, Western time that will shortly dam the rivers and gobble the rainforest… and with it the coming reign of those promoting infinite theft from a finite world?’.
The book Question 7 deserves reading and rereading to uncover and appreciate its nuances and depth as we come to understand Flanagan’s humanity and the importance of the central emotion in his life: love. He best sums up his love of the Tasmanian rainforest and his family, and the interconnectedness of events with Well’s literature when he says, ‘I only write this book that you are now reading, no more than a love note to my parents and island home, a world that has vanished, because over a century ago another writer wrote a book that decades later seized another mind with such force that it became a reality that reshaped the world… In this way, the world begat a book that would in turn beget the world’.
Flanagan’s literary skills are on full display in a concluding chapter that refers to his out-of-body experience while kayaking on his beloved Franklin River. But as Flanagan frequently reminds the reader throughout this compelling and fascinating autobiography, ‘that’s life’.
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