Flanagan, Richard (2023). Question 7. Knopf.
Connecting dots. It would be very unkind to compare it to drawing the outline of a picture by connecting the numbered dots, and yet, maybe it is just that, for in addition there is the colourful writing, in this grey Tasmanian way, telling us what life is all about: who will love longer? From Chekov to Kafka, from HG Wells to Rebecca West, from Szilard and the Martians, from Ferebee dropping the atomic bomb to Flanagan’s father in the Japanese POW camp, from Richard Flanagan the child to Richard Flanagan the epic survivor in the river, to Oxford scholar, to Japan, to genocidal Tasmanian history, to writer – connecting the dots that draws the outline of a mask that Richard Flanagan wears in public. That’s life. But what a life! Made for autofiction! A story worth telling, as perhaps opposed to those stories that have never been told – and will never be told – as in the people without a history (cf. Eric R. Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History). Of course, the latter insists that the common people who are not in the history books should be and must be as they are the silent forces that move history. As a Marxist one can only agree, but as a novelist one must avoid the tedium of an ordinary life lived. And so, it is sometimes a bit boring to read about his family life in the backcountry of Tasmania, brothers, sisters, uncles aunts, father and mother, grandmother, acquaintances that drop in and out. But boy oh boy, when the 21-year-old Richard Flanagan is rescued from near death in the Franklin River (described in too much agonising detail), a life not ordinary, as a novelist takes off. His penchant for historical context (having studied history no less at miserable Oxford), for the real movers and shakers of recorded history is fairly obvious, especially when pointing to the possibility of a novelist, HG Wells, having changed the world via a literal chain reaction of events. The last 100 years or so of a history of science ending in Frankensteinian, Dr Strangelove horror movies, including the latest of the greatest, Oppenheimer, just postdating Flanagan’s novel (the latter being rightly criticised for not addressing the horrors of Hiroshima). For Flanagan Hiroshima is a trigger word, for while his father was liberated by it, the global consequences stare us in the eyes, with a minute or so to go to a final midnight on the doomsday clock. Leo Szilard, as a key dot in his chain reaction discovery – and who was inspired by HG Wells in the first place who had conceived of the atomic bomb – only belatedly realised that the genie had escaped the bottle, lobbying Truman and Co not to use the bomb, but -alas – the generals calculated with deadly accuracy that not to use it would only prolong the war and cost many more lives than the lives lost in Hiroshima. Flanigan, while agreeing in principle that the bomb should never have been used, grapples with the calculation: his father would have died in the prison camp for sure, were it not for the bomb. Flanigan’s perhaps ill-conceived visit to post-war Japan to meet with former prison guards, resulting in the bizarre meeting with the aged guard that his father had named Lizard (a convicted war criminal released in 1956) whom he convinces to hit him in the face - as was the custom in the camp – was cut short by a 7.3 earthquake. There are moments when Flanigan caves in to the commonly expressed Allied idea that the Japs deserved what was coming to them – a bit like that the Germans deserved the carpet bombing because after all they had voted for Hitler. This in stark contrast to the genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines, so starkly described by Flanagan, the contradiction of British slave convicts slaughtering the Aborigines, as if for sport, dog eats dog, human debasement that is plastered over by a British history of British settlers who committed some crimes but by and large brought civilisation and enlightenment to people in darkness. As a migrant from Germany living in New Zealand/Aotearoa – which is often compared to Tasmania – I am painfully aware that migration (forced and voluntary) as a colonial enterprise in the so-called New World is not just a historical fact that should be moved on from, but has repercussions that endure to this day and will endure forever. The descendants of indigenous peoples – not necessarily defined these days by bloodlines but by adopting such an identity – are only now waking up to the possibility that history must have consequences, that historical wrongs must be put right, that the descendants of the colonizers - not necessarily defined these days by bloodlines but by adopting such an identity – must face up to their responsibilities and start singing that lyric by Midnight Oil ‘let’s give it back to them’. Flanagan does hint at the possibility that he can adopt an Aborigine identity, not only because he is on their side but also because he has absorbed an Aborigine mentality by living on their land which affects his soul, like the endless rain sprouting moss on his body, turning his feet into roots, so that he becomes a fixed part of the ancient landscape, or what is left of it. The ancient idea that you are the product of your land – to which you will return on your death – has however equally long been usurped by the idea of the migrant who uproots his existence from his/her land and moves to another land to put down new roots. Sadly, this is hardly ever done by invitation, but by conquest, or else it is done from desperation as refugees that are uprooted and driven from their homelands. There are no easy solutions to all of these conundrums, apart from Flanagan’s sigh, à la Chekov, at many chapter endings: ‘that’ life’ – perhaps the French version would have added a bit of sophistication. Flanagan the literary and science historian must have done considerable research weaving the two together, and together with his personal history he has achieved a notable outcome: a plea for humanism in the face of a fast deteriorating world of hate and war, asking us to face up to the dismal, recorded past in order to save ourselves and live in comparative peace and tranquillity, as the Tasmanian Aborigines had done for 40,000 years or so without ever writing a word about it. Quo vadis, Richard Flanagan? Or better still, from one who also went more native than the natives, as they say: D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?
