From the very first sentence of Richard Flanagan’s 12th book, Question 7, the model for this extraordinary, hybrid work is clear. WG Sebald is there in the subject matter: the second world war and the ethics of mass bombing campaigns; the interweaving of personal and political history; the blending of truth, memory and a kind of hyper-real imagined past. Sebald is there in the deeper currents: a somewhat solitary, occasionally ridiculous middle-aged man seeking to come to terms with his place in the world, wrestling in particular with his complex love for a father whose own life was defined by his experiences in the war. It’s there even in the rhythms of the prose. The book begins like a Sebald tribute act, with its stateliness, its subclauses, its melancholy: “In the winter of 2012, against my better judgment and for reasons that were not entirely to do with writing – much as I said they were – and which even now are not clear to me, I visited the site of Ohama Camp, Japan, where my father had once been interned.”
Question 7 is the story of Flanagan’s attempts to understand his parents, both of whom have recently died, and through them the strange contingency of his own life. His mother is presented as a warm, ambitious, eccentric figure, dragging the family up from hardscrabble poverty in rural Tasmania. Flanagan’s father’s wartime experience, first on the Death Railway, then in a prisoner of war camp, inspired his most celebrated book, the Booker prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Here, though, Flanagan seeks to present his father’s life in a different way, as an example of the absurd calculus and complex happenstance of existence. This is the reason for the book’s title, which refers to an obscure Chekhov story that asks something like the same questions. Can life be reduced to a series of equations? Are we all here as a result of the whims of chance? Specifically, in Flanagan’s case, what would have happened to his father had the atom bomb not been dropped on Hiroshima?
