Very readable thought-provoking memoir and meditation on the history of the nuclear bomb plus the surprising role of HG Wells in that. Fascinating and educative. Highly recommended.

Richard Flanagan mines his life for his fiction – and now comes his memoir. ‘Question 7’ is a question posed by Chekov, culminating in ‘who loves longer?’ Flanagan’s is a bravura book, one of tight control even as it spans wide. It starts with Flanagan’s father, a POW in a Japanese camp on the ‘Death Railway’ – who would have been killed had the bomb not been dropped on Hiroshima. The book does not claim that as justification for the atom bomb, more concerned with abhorrence of war, but it recognizes the link between Hiroshima and his father’s survival as an arc of story that is alive that brings into being the Richard Flanagan who would not have been born without the bomb. Which would not have happened without a novel by H.G. Wells, whose tempestuous affair with Rebecca West is a fictionalized part of the tale. The moral dilemma behind the dropping of that first atom bomb is told more intimately and persuasively than the visual bombast of the film Oppenheimer. As a memoir the book gives a loving, detailed portrait of the shell-shocked father and his quiet wisdom ( I loved his line ‘Money is like shit. Pile it up and it stinks. Spread it around and things grow’). A concluding chapter is an intense battle with death on the Franklin River, Flanagan trapped in a broken kayak. The book is an exploration of being Tasmanian, replacing an exterminated Aboriginal people yet somehow imbuing a related sense of being from qualities of a primordial landscape that is facing its own extinction.
It's a book that lives inside you, which I think is Flanagan’s purpose for a book. It expresses a fourth tense, not past present or future but one which embraces all of those elements, a timeless living out. Such a tense redefines narrative, so while story progresses it doesn’t leave you in a place where everything is revealed and understood, but becomes a loop in which an effort to understand perhaps becomes a process of absorbing. The book is literary and human and strong and frail, and being such it merges with the life of the reader.

With heart, soul and mind as open as the sea

This is a book which has taken me a long long time to read, despite the fact that I was offered it as an advanced copy for review. That I failed to read it, in timely fashion is precisely because some writers – and Flanagan is one such – write from a place of such deep, wide potency and authenticity that they really demand that the reader, too, will read from that place.

I am shallower than Flanagan, and cannot inhabit there for too long a time. A lot of what he writes about – here and elsewhere touches the very depths and dreadfulness of the human experience – genocide, brutality, war, indifference, terror, existential despair, as well as the counterbalance of an intensity of joy, deep gratitude and love, both given and received. At times, that feeling place, that exposure of the puzzlement and despair was more than I could bear. As at times was that other side.

I don’t know whether Flanagan ever took psychedelics, or whether it was just (!) the long experience of what clinically might be described as a ‘near-death’ experience, but which Flanagan details AS death, in a kayak accident he had as a young man, which has given him such a very deep and extraordinary way of being in the world, and writing about it.

Question 7, the title, comes from a short mathematical ‘puzzle’ by Chekhov, which is almost like some kind of koan “Who Loves Longer”

The subject matter of this book, part autobiography, part biography but all also given the imaginative sewing together of memory, time and projection into the mind and heart of another, around whatever factual information exists, covers the race to create atomic weapons, during the Second World War, the physicists involved, Hiroshima, the Japanese run Death Camps in which Allied servicemen were imprisoned, the despoilation of Tasmania and the wiping out of its indigenous peoples by the British during the period, from the early 1800’s when it became a penal settlement. Tying much of this together is Flanagan’s own family history, as fictionalised in Narrow Road to the Deep North, and the writing, and life, of HG Wells, his relationship with Rebecca West, and the role of his book The World Set Free in the conception of the work of the Manhattan Project : creating the atom bomb. And Chekhov’s Question, underlying all.

I know, how on earth? Well it just does, as does Flanagan’s explanation of a different notion of how time is FELT from the way most Europeans conceive of it. This connects to physics, too, at atomic level.

HG Wells meets a young woman and begins a torrid affair that influences his later writing. A talented scientist realises that the power of the atom could be uses to create a devastating weapon. The crew of a bomber plane release a bomb which kills thousands and changes the direction of world history. An Australian prisoner of war struggles to survive in a Japanese camp. A young boy starts life in poverty but grows to be a writer. An island is conquered and destroyed.
This is an amazing read! Partly a series of short stories and musings, partly a treatise about the effect that humans have on society, the whole is just wonderful. Flanagan is a great writer and here his passion for his homeland shines through. The themes are disparate and shouldn't work but they do and the whole is powerful and profound.

Richard Flanagan can really weave a story, even more so when it's true. Would highly recommend to anyone who is interested in war non-fiction!

A gorgeous and profound memoir. I loved the idea of the 'butterfly effect' within this book - how one moment in time can ripple out and have numerous unknown consequences, both big and small. It had emotional depth and some humor in parts, which kept me engaged despite not fully understanding what kind of book I was reading. I would have liked the blurb to contain more, since Question 7 isn't the most straightforward read - which is fine - but it took me a little while to have context for the words I was reading.

"And so, once more, a disappointing reality was reinvented as a fiction that metamorphosed into an unexpected new reality."

Question 7 is the fifth of Richard Flanagan's books I've read, and confirms him as a fascinating, if inconsistent, author - the other four being:

Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish - fascinating in literary terms and a physically beautiful work which, with its use of different coloured inks, has clear echoes in Nicola Barker’s 2017 Goldsmiths Prize winning H(A)PPY;

The Narrow Road to the Deep North - overly safe and conventional (and did you know he finished it the day his father died - surprised he didn't mention that in any interviews);

First Person - a very creative work, one where Flanagan perhaps used the device of his story to settle a few too many scores and drag in a little too much personal history; and

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams - "One of the most spectacularly incoherent novels ever to reach print" to quote Brian Stableford on Bram Stoker’s Lair of the White Worm, but deliberately so and in a so-bad-its-good way.

Naturally the Booker chose to reward much the least ambitious of these, The Narrow Road to the Deep North being one of the weaker winners of the prize. But with Question 7, this year's jury have a chance to make a bolder decision and recognise this hybrid work as the novel, if a novel with little fiction, which I think it is. Flanagan himself teases as the nature of the work in one of his epigraphs which quotes a review of Moby Dick: The author has not given his effort here the benefit of knowing whether it is history, autobiography, gazetteer, tragedy, romance, almanac, melodrama, or fantasy. It may be myriad, it may not. The question is put, but where is the answer?

Indeed Question 7 as a novel is an exemplar of what Javier Cercas, in Anne McLean's translation, described in The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Novel:

"The novel is not the genre of answers, but that of questions: writing a novel consists of posing a complex question in order to formulate it in the most complex way possible, not to answer it, or not to answer it in a clear and unequivocal way; it consists of immersing oneself in an enigma to render it insoluble, not to decipher it (unless rendering it insoluble is, precisely, the only way to decipher it). That enigma is the blind spot, and the best things these novels have to say they say by way of it: by way of that silence bursting with meaning, that visionary blindness, that radiant darkness, that ambiguity without solution. That blind spot is what we are."

And Flanagan's question is Question 7 as posed by Chekhov in the story Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician as translated by Peter Constantine:

"7. Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm.; just as thr train was about to depart, however, an order came from that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?"

His lack of an answer traces a path from the the near successful genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population, through to the novels of H.G. Wells and his love affair with Rebecca West, through to Leo Szilard, the Manhatten Project and the bomb that ends the war before the PoW camps in Japan could end Flanagan's father's life:

"We cannot be what we cannot dream. And sometimes we discover that we live in the dreams and nightmares of others and we dream anew. I only write this book that you are now reading, no more than a love note to my parents and my 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. It was a story of horror that was his fear of love, complete love without measure or boundary, and he created in its place an idea of destruction without limit. In this way, the world begat a book that would in turn beget the world.

Without Rebecca West’s kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells’s book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have no Manhattan Project and without the Manhattan Project there is no lever at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them."

But that is to imply a linear causuality that is the opposite of what Flanagan wishes to suggest. He acknowledges the influence of an essay by Siena Stubbs, which suggests a fourth tense in Yolŋu:

"It’s what is happening now. This has always happened, is happening and will happen in the future. Yolŋu people have always sat/are sitting/will always sit under the shaded resting place named Buṉumbirr at this place and were thinking/are thinking/will think about the fish that they will catch later in the day.

Listen to the sound of Bunbuyŋu Miyarama (the ancestors’ voices) …
the sound of the Miliwurrwurr (Rirratjiŋu clan) people talking…
anticipating the sweet taste of the fish.

The past is in the present is in the future. Our ancestors were here, are here and will be here, waiting for the tide to go out so the fish can be caught. Yambirrpa has always provided fish for Yolŋu people and it will continue to."

And as Flanagan concludes on the morality or otherwise of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan:

"What if vengeance and atonement both are simply the lie that time can be reversed, and thereby some equality, some equilibrium, some justice had? Is it simply truer to say Hiroshima happened, Hiroshima is still happening, and Hiroshima will always happen?"

A brilliantly conceived work. There's a lot packed in to its relatively modest page count, and some elements will work better or less well for different readers - for me the role of HG Wells in the chain reaction of events most fascinating, although other parts of the Manhatten Project very well trodden territory, the political discussions on Tasmanian and the role of the Martians (the English) most thought provoking, and the family memoir skippable (hence the 4 not 5 stars).

To end with a fascinating fact of my own, not in the novel. H G Wells visited Australia in late 1938 / early 1939. The then Australian PM, I believe the only Tasmanin to ever hold the post, criticised him for his speeches there as he has “so far indulged his well-known political sympathies as to make disparaging remarks about the leaders of other nations”. Those leaders about which Wells was so rude … Hitler and Mussolini. And of course the PM himself was largely echoing the appeasement policy that still prevailed in the UK, a policy some might argue that was all about preservation of the colonies.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

I have never read a book quite like this one. It's a family memoir, a history of the atom bomb, an exploration of colonialism, a vivid recollection of a near-death experience, a reflection on morality and a synthesis of everything that goes into making a person. I'm not really clever enough to review it properly, but I found it so affecting and it gave me lots to think about.

The title, Question 7, is a reference to Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician by Anton Chekhov. The question is: 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 from that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?

There is no answer. That's life!

I chose this book because it was written by a booker prize winner, though I have never actually read any of his books. But when I picked it up to read, and read the blurb I felt that maybe it wasn't really a book for me. However, I started reading and kept reading. It is beautifully written and flows more like very accessible narrative poetry. I kept reading it because it was lovely to read, and I wanted to know what was happening next. I found the text unpredictable, which is one of the things that keeps me reading. (Once I feel I know what is going to happen next I usually get bored with a book) It is a hard to describe book, but I think anyone that reads the first few pages in a bookshop will buy the book.

Richard Flanagan is the author of some eight novels: his debut “Death of a River Guide” is about a man facing death trapped by a rock in Tasmania’s Franklin River after a Kayakan expedition he is leading goes wrong; his seventh “First Person” is a meta-fictional novel based on his own experiences ghost writing the autobiography of a con-man; his eighth and more recent “The Living Sea of Waking Dreams” is a complex magic-realism infused tribute to the disappearing environment of his native Tasmania.

His sixth novel “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” won the Booker Prize in 2014 (the first year that the prize was opened to US authors and effectively the last year in which it has featured Antipodean authors). That book was about the Australian prisoners of war forced to work by the Japanese on the Burma Death Railways – as was his father who, in the war’s last stages was moved to work as a slave labourer in a coal mine in Japan and facing almost certain death in the upcoming winter (either via exhaustion or execution when the Americans invaded) was saved by the Japanese surrender which followed the dropping of the atomic bomb

This book is:

Part family memoir - in particular something of a love letter to Flanagan’s Mother and Father as he tries to understand what shaped them, in his father’s case his experiences in captivity;

Part literary history - in particular around the figure of HG Wells and his affair with Rebecca West – and the book “The World Set Free” in which he invented the concept of an “atomic bomb” and which was written in - and in Flanagan’s views in reaction - to the tentative stages of his relationship with West, but with Chekhov (who inspired the title) and Kafka also featuring;

Part scientific history - centering around the maverick scientist and inventor Leo Szilard who – inspired by HG Wells book - conceived of the idea of a nuclear chain reaction, kick started the Manhattan project and then dedicated most of his life to trying and failing to stop atomic/nuclear bombs being applied;

Part reflection on Tasmania - and its history of genocide and (by the convicts used as cheap labour for the sheep farms) slavery and its twentieth century environmental degradation – as well as the role and culpability of the English in these actions (although this is a book which deliberately eschews simple attribution of blame)

Part meditation on the process of writing – for example on the Western tradition and how it relates to a different and much older world view formed over the 40,000 years of human habitation of Tasmania;

Part more personal reflection on writing - and his own sense of being something of an outsider linking it to his families conflicted relationship with Catholicism;

Part autobiographical meditation – a powerful near-ending sequence examines the personal trauma that resulted from the event that inspired his first novel, an episode he thinks of as dividing his life into “before he died” and “after he died”

And much more.

For much of the book it can feel like the book has two rather independent parts: the personal/family/Tasmanian part and the literary/scientific history part with the causal trace of events (from West to Wells to Szilard to Manhattan to Hiroshima to Flanagan’s father’s survival to his birth) the only link.

But as the book nears its end the themes and ideas do draw together powerfully so for example he links HG Wells earlier work to a Kafka short story (the Penal Colony) to Tasmanian history to English colonialism to mass destruction

Most of all I would really love the Booker judges to see this as a novel in its widest, non European canon form, as it would make a brilliant addition to the Booker longlist. The writing around science inevitably reminds the reader of Benjamin Labatut who was International Booker longlisted for “When We Cease to Understand the World” but not Booker longlisted for “The MANIAC” (which of course centres around the Manhattan project for its mid period). While Flanagan perhaps lacks some of Labatut’s ability to draw in multiple areas of science/history he more than makes up for it in writing with feeling, passion, belief and ultimately soul. And as Flanagan explains of his very first forays into writing (before he could even accurately form letters): ""nd so at the beginning I learnt this: the words of a book are never the book, the soul of it is everything."

Highly recommended.

My thanks to Chatto and Windus, Random House UK for an ARC via NetGalley

I found this a really challenging read that rewarded the effort and then some. It is very strangely structured in a complex and convincing way, stories sitting within stories like Russian dolls and all the experiences of a life building to the man who writes the novel and shares what he has learned.

Richard Flanagan moves through such a range of subjects, styles and intention that you have to concentrate to make the connections with him - from a love affair of HG Wells, through Hiroshima, Tasmania, and London in-between, you travel with the author through time and location to build up a really intimate picture of his inner life and motivations.

It had me spellbound and would merit more than one reading to really appreciate everything it holds.

Richard Flanagan writes a remarkably astonishing multi-genre, imaginative and speculative memoir that he describes as a love song to Tasmania, its history, his family, and a world that has vanished, questioning history's too often linear and limiting perspective,, and the sense and stories we personally construct of who we are and how we come to be where we are in the present. Anton Chekov's satirical and absurd Question 7 is cited, Who loves longer, a man or a woman? He juxtaposes the bleak darkest of tragedies, the devastating bombing of Hiroshima, with the serendipity that it simultaneously is the reason that he exists at all as his father was in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, a situation in which he would have surely died.

The dropping of the atomic bomb is traced backed to HG Wells and his love affair with Rebecca West, the break up of which has him writing The World Set Free, a book that inspired scientist Leo Szilar and traces the follow up to the horrors of the bomb itself. This characterises the chain reactions, a thoughtful set of circular life connections that Flanagan makes, including the part played by British colonialism in genocide and the destruction of the natural world. He is offering the kind of surprising insights and perspectives that undoubtedly will challenge accepted realities and make people think. He is unsparing in relating his failings and his frightening near death experience in a river.

This is a profound, philosophical and emotional read, a revealing, captivating memoir that takes in the bigger picture amidst the more personal and which I found utterly gripping as it shines a critical light on what is accepted as reality. It is a unforgettable brilliant 'memoir' that I have no hesitation in saying this is a must read and am recommending it to all readers, particularly as I believe this is the best thing that this acclaimed author has written! Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

Question 7 begins with an epigraph from a review of Moby-Dick in a 1851 edition of the Hobart Town Mercury. The reviewer is baffled as to whether they are reading “history, autobiography, gazetteer, tragedy, romance, almanac, melodrama or fantasy”. This neatly summarizes how the reader will feel about Question 7 and how Flanagan's memoir defies a single genre description. The narrative creates a spider web of interconnecting and chain reaction events. Fact and someone's "truth" is often mixed in with imaginative speculations or a discourse on Flanagan's philosphy of life and writing.

The book starts with Flanagan revisiting his father's incarceration in a Japanese work camp in World War II. The site in Omaha reveals no evidence of its existence, in fact a "Love Hotel" now stand there. Flanagan recounts how the horrifying annihilation of the populace meant that his father escaped his certain death through exhaustion in the camp and so, if it were not for the A bomb then he himself would not exist. He segues into the history of his home island, Tasmania and the devastating effects on the populace of colonialism and reveals details about his family history. Flanagan postulates that had HG Wells not had an affair with Rebecca West then he would not have run off to Switzerland where he wrote "The War of the Worlds", a novel that was read by the physicist Leo Szilard who became interested in the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction which then in turn led to the development of the atomic bomb. Flanagan also imagines what the first kiss between West and Wells was like. I've given these examples to show how the book jumos around and mixes fact, fiction, memory, history and wild sepculation.

I didn't find this an easy book to read. It required concentration and trying to keep in mind the myriad, jigsaw like pieces but I did find it thought provoking and an interesting way to construct a memoir. I liked how Flanagan revealed how we learn about and view our parents in new and different lights as we ourselves age. I found the final part of the book where Flanagan is almost drowned very poignant ( but I think it retreads ground covered in an early novel which I have not read). I'm still unsure about the meaning of Question 7 as regards the book. Question 7 is taken from a Chekhove story about a "Mad Mathematician" who puts forward a parody of a school maths 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?” Throughout the book Flanagan asks "Who loves longer?" which made little sense to me. Perhaps that is the point of Question 7 - it is unsolvable and illogical and a bit mad - just like life, we never really know the answer, we can just make our own guesses and "truth" to make sense of an impossible situation.

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book. I honestly didn’t know what to expect when I received the chance to read this book as it’s not my usual type of book. I was pleasantly surprised. Very well written. Great stories.