One of Chekhov’s earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov’s question 7 is typical: 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?
Who?
You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer? And why do we do what we do to each other?”
Where to start with Question 7?
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing an estimated 140,000 people. The bombing of Nagasaki and the subsequent surrender of Japan lead to the end of the war in the Asia-Pacific within a week. In a nuclear chain reaction, like the one that triggered the bomb over Hiroshima, neutrons are released from one nuclear fission event to trigger further fission events in a continuous sequence, leading to the release of an immense immense amount of energy. One event triggers the next and the next.
During the latter half of the war, Richard Flanagan’s father had been a Japanese POW; a slave-labourer in a camp where most men ended up being worked to death. But then the United States dropped the bomb. And Flanagan’s father survived. So if it weren’t for the bombing of Hiroshima, Flanagan’s father would not have been able to return home to Tasmania. If it weren’t for the bomb, there would be no Richard Flanagan.
Question 7 plays back and forth from this point. The book opens in 2012, where, on a trip to Japan, Flanagan interviews and maintains good appearances with a number of former guards from the POW camp his father was imprisoned in. Then we jump back and forth to other people and other points of time, all linked back, in their own way, to the dropping of the bomb. We are introduced to physicist Leo Seward and his hypothetical bath-time thoughts. He thinks back to the works of HG Wells; to The World Set Free. A world in flames. He realises a chain reaction was possible; his element choice was wrong. And what of Wells himself? How did his long sustained affair with Rebecca West affect his writing? Would Seward have had the same revelations if Wells had been faithful to his wife? How does Franz Kafka play into this?
Back and forth we jump. Its seems like it should be disjointed—but it’s not. Back in Japan, Flanagan can find no trace of the mines his father laboured in. He meets the ex-guard who oversaw his father’s camp. The guard claims to have no memory of that time. Flanagan then asks the man to slap him in the face—for there was a particular kind of slap used as discipline in the Japanese army that would have been used on the labourers. The man said he didn’t remember—but his muscles told another story. This bizarre request didn’t make the older man fear, but the subsequent earthquake did.
The old guard denied having memory of his war crimes. Memory shapes our interactions with the past. We stretch out again in other parts of the book to reflect on the impacts of the Manhattan Project. The impacts of the Project are well recorded, so we remember them. But other parts of the war were not. Written histories have failed to record the fates of men like Flanagan’s father, and so they are more likely to be forgotten. Or, as Flanagan points out, the fates of the aboriginal peoples in Tasmania, victims of a British-lead genocide:
[…] history constantly failed, history constantly recurred not as answers or comfort, not as a story of progress, but as a massacre site, a napalmed logging clearfell, convict words that spoke of what couldn’t be spoken, mythical beings long dead that kept returning, haunting, asking of me something I have spent a life trying and failing to answer”
It’s here we turn back towards Wells. The Martians in the War of the Worlds were written as a critique of British colonialism. The Martians in Tasmania created the system. And that system still continues to dismiss Tasmanian histories.
Flowing from the same current as histories, we are also asked to meditate on the nature of words and their meanings; on terms once used in Tasmania that are now falling into disuse; on who will remember them. All words are transitory; modern ones as much as older ones. So many broken URLs, so many 404 errors. When will they vanish from our collective understanding?
By the latter half of the book, the underlying metaphor—I felt—seemed to change from that of a chain reaction to that of a river. And it’s in the final section that the Flanagan describes a particularly harrowing event: the time he nearly died; drowned in the Franklin River at the age of 21.
I ‘read’ Question 7 as an audiobook, and Flanagan himself narrates it. While, the book itself is written in an idiosyncratic style. I think the fact that I listened to it being narrated rather than reading it sort of emphasized the ‘flowing’ feel. Interestingly, despite the topics he touches on—many of them very personal—he doesn’t get overly emotional. I think I heard more held back anger when he describes the degree of the racism encountered at Oxford than when an ex Japanese prison guard offered to give his father the equivalent of $20. Maybe in that last instance, he was just tired.
I think the point of Chekhov’s question 7 is that while the writer can ask questions, it is not always up to them to provide the answer. The same goes for Flanagan’s Question 7. Who do we remember and who do we forget?
I’m going to have to re-read this one day, if only to take better notes. But I think this is the most ambitious book Flanagan has written by far.