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Question 7
By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West's affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this genre-defying daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die.
At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.
At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.
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First published October 31, 2023
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About the author
Richard Flanagan
29 books1,632 followersRichard Flanagan (born 1961) is an author, historian and film director from Tasmania, Australia. He was president of the Tasmania University Union and a Rhodes Scholar. Each of his novels has attracted major praise. His first, Death of a River Guide (1994), was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, as were his next two, The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997) and Gould's Book of Fish (2001). His earlier, non-fiction titles include books about the Gordon River, student issues, and the story of conman John Friedrich.
Two of his novels are set on the West Coast of Tasmania; where he lived in the township of Rosebery as a child. Death of a River Guide relates to the Franklin River, Gould's Book of Fish to the Macquarie Harbour Penal Station, and The Sound of One Hand Clapping to the Hydro settlements in the Central Highlands of Tasmania.
Two of his novels are set on the West Coast of Tasmania; where he lived in the township of Rosebery as a child. Death of a River Guide relates to the Franklin River, Gould's Book of Fish to the Macquarie Harbour Penal Station, and The Sound of One Hand Clapping to the Hydro settlements in the Central Highlands of Tasmania.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 926 reviews
April 24, 2024
Question 7 is a sort of autobiography… A book of memory… Contemplations on the world and history…
“Who loves longer, a man or a woman?” Anton Chekhov Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician
This is a seventh question in the mad mathematician’s questionnaire…
Questions and answers… Questions and no answers…
The question was, What is a structure of atom? And the answer was an atomic bomb…
The question was, How could H. G. Wells write such crap as Marriage? And the answer was a love affair of the author with the critic…
Richard Flanagan starts the novel recalling his father…
Time flies bringing changes… And in this world we all are time travellers… Living we travel through time with a normal speed…
Some questions are answered right away… Some questions will never have any answer.
“Who loves longer, a man or a woman?” Anton Chekhov Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician
This is a seventh question in the mad mathematician’s questionnaire…
Questions and answers… Questions and no answers…
Each of us has a public life and private life. But beyond both is a secret life that baffles us… If it is a question that can never be answered, it is still the question we must keep asking, if only in order to understand that life is never binary, nor reducible to cant or code, but a mystery we at best apprehend. In Chekhov’s stories, the only fools are those with answers.
The question was, What is a structure of atom? And the answer was an atomic bomb…
The question was, How could H. G. Wells write such crap as Marriage? And the answer was a love affair of the author with the critic…
Richard Flanagan starts the novel recalling his father…
He saw the world aslant. It was for him a great tragicomedy in which the comedy was made poignant by the tragedy and the tragedy rendered bearable by the comedy.
Time flies bringing changes… And in this world we all are time travellers… Living we travel through time with a normal speed…
We will have arrived back on Wells’s time traveller’s dying beach, alone, in a dimming twilight. If I were a sculptor this would be my art: rusting machinery without purpose rising out of oily scum. People might see it as beauty or meaning. But they would be wrong. It would be what remains.
Some questions are answered right away… Some questions will never have any answer.
January 11, 2024
I love this kind of book. I just can't quite tell how much I love this specific one.
Question 7 is a big, discursive, multidisciplinary chunk of life-writing from Australian author Richard Flanagan, which mixes memoir, literary history, travel writing, and philosophical musings on everything from ethics to colonialism to class.
Most of all, perhaps, it's about the contingency of reality – the extreme unlikelihood of having ended up where we are today. Flanagan is only here because his father survived the Japanese POW camps; camps he survived only because the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; a bomb which was dropped only because physicist Leo Szilard came up with the concept of the nuclear chain reaction; a concept Szilard only came up with because he had read the HG Wells novel The World Set Free; a novel Wells only wrote because he was trying to get over a break-up with his lover Rebecca West; and on and on and on…
Flanagan tells all of these stories simultaneously, and the juxtaposition is wildly productive. What emerges is a sense of how the present is jumbled-up with the past and the future, and cannot be disentangled from either of them – something fiction struggles to deal with, he suggests, since ‘all writing is trapped in tenses when life isn't’.
Well, possibly. Flanagan slightly loses me when he starts waxing metaphysical; he is strongest when concentrating on the facts, many of those he turns up being new to me and rather surprising. I was amazed, for instance, to find that HG Wells is linked not only to the birth of nuclear weapons (through Szilard), but also to the colonial past of Flanagan's homeland: ‘The War of the Worlds had its genesis in the attempted genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people,’ something which indeed is referenced explicitly in Wells's novel.
On Tasmania Question 7 is excellent, better than many a longer book on the complicated past of that extraordinary island. ‘The Tasmanian story,’ Flanagan says, ‘is the ur-story of the end of the world, much imitated and never rivalled.’ He is particularly excoriating on the tendency of the British to shake their heads (as the Independent newspaper did in 2009) over the fact that ‘white Australians still struggle to come to terms with their colonial past’ – as if, Flanagan fumes,
It's this colonial awareness of the past that infuses the whole book, giving it a sense of generalised gloomy responsibility. ‘No one is exempt from guilt,’ he says; and, elsewhere, ‘There is no memory without shame.’
Unfortunately, Flanagan doesn't confine himself to interesting facts and reflections only, preferring to reach towards something more philosophical and, to my taste, less meaningful. The book takes its title from a short story by Chekhov making fun of exam questions. Chekhov's question seven reads:
Flanagan takes this as emblematic – though of what, I'm still not sure. Of the absurdity of fact, perhaps. He comes back to it in all kinds of contexts where it seems of dubious relevance or taste. The underlying problem is that he's very suspicious (as is clear from some of his fiction) of ‘history’, and he discusses this a little when he talks about his time at Oxford:
This leads him to denounce the ‘lies we call time, history, reality, memory, detail, facts’. But these things are not the same. Memory may lie, but history and facts are not lies, pretty much by definition – and it's actually of crucial importance to Flanagan's book that they're not, since it's based very specifically on the baffling teleology of how things actually took place. If this is a story of things that may have happened a bit like this or may not, then it has no value at all.
Because the bomb over Hiroshima contained four silk bags of cordite to start the chain reaction, and because the exact death toll is not known, Flanagan finds himself writing: ‘all that can be said with absolute certainty is that soaring as pure energy and vaporised fragments towards the heavens that morning…were four silk powder bags.’ Of course it's not factually true that this is all that can be said about Hiroshima, but nor is it really poetically true either. Later he goes even further:
Well, no, I'm sorry, but this isn't good enough. It's all very well to pontificate that ‘reality is often no more than the enthusiastic answer we give to our dreams and nightmares’, but when it comes to the nuclear bombing of tens of thousands of people, facts matter, and there is in some sense an intellectual duty to recognise what is real and what isn't.
Still, in the end, this uneasiness I felt only represents one failing in a book chock-full of successes – a lone misfire in a box of intellectual fireworks. Maybe if I trusted Flanagan more, I would have gone along with it more enthusiastically, but I still often have the sense that he is writing sentences which have the shape of something profound without all the substance.
All the same, there are so many strange and wonderful connections here – between cultures, languages, and time periods – that you can't help but come out of it feeling completely energised.
Question 7 is a big, discursive, multidisciplinary chunk of life-writing from Australian author Richard Flanagan, which mixes memoir, literary history, travel writing, and philosophical musings on everything from ethics to colonialism to class.
Most of all, perhaps, it's about the contingency of reality – the extreme unlikelihood of having ended up where we are today. Flanagan is only here because his father survived the Japanese POW camps; camps he survived only because the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; a bomb which was dropped only because physicist Leo Szilard came up with the concept of the nuclear chain reaction; a concept Szilard only came up with because he had read the HG Wells novel The World Set Free; a novel Wells only wrote because he was trying to get over a break-up with his lover Rebecca West; and on and on and on…
Flanagan tells all of these stories simultaneously, and the juxtaposition is wildly productive. What emerges is a sense of how the present is jumbled-up with the past and the future, and cannot be disentangled from either of them – something fiction struggles to deal with, he suggests, since ‘all writing is trapped in tenses when life isn't’.
Well, possibly. Flanagan slightly loses me when he starts waxing metaphysical; he is strongest when concentrating on the facts, many of those he turns up being new to me and rather surprising. I was amazed, for instance, to find that HG Wells is linked not only to the birth of nuclear weapons (through Szilard), but also to the colonial past of Flanagan's homeland: ‘The War of the Worlds had its genesis in the attempted genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people,’ something which indeed is referenced explicitly in Wells's novel.
On Tasmania Question 7 is excellent, better than many a longer book on the complicated past of that extraordinary island. ‘The Tasmanian story,’ Flanagan says, ‘is the ur-story of the end of the world, much imitated and never rivalled.’ He is particularly excoriating on the tendency of the British to shake their heads (as the Independent newspaper did in 2009) over the fact that ‘white Australians still struggle to come to terms with their colonial past’ – as if, Flanagan fumes,
the genocide was our invention and not theirs, as though the totalitarian slave system was our choice and not their gulag. 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.
It's this colonial awareness of the past that infuses the whole book, giving it a sense of generalised gloomy responsibility. ‘No one is exempt from guilt,’ he says; and, elsewhere, ‘There is no memory without shame.’
Unfortunately, Flanagan doesn't confine himself to interesting facts and reflections only, preferring to reach towards something more philosophical and, to my taste, less meaningful. The book takes its title from a short story by Chekhov making fun of exam questions. Chekhov's question seven reads:
Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?
Flanagan takes this as emblematic – though of what, I'm still not sure. Of the absurdity of fact, perhaps. He comes back to it in all kinds of contexts where it seems of dubious relevance or taste. The underlying problem is that he's very suspicious (as is clear from some of his fiction) of ‘history’, and he discusses this a little when he talks about his time at Oxford:
I studied history, an idea of time formed over 3000 years of human experience in Europe, which, I discovered, made perfect sense of European time, stopping at all the stations of European progress and European thought. […] But it made no sense of Tasmania.
This leads him to denounce the ‘lies we call time, history, reality, memory, detail, facts’. But these things are not the same. Memory may lie, but history and facts are not lies, pretty much by definition – and it's actually of crucial importance to Flanagan's book that they're not, since it's based very specifically on the baffling teleology of how things actually took place. If this is a story of things that may have happened a bit like this or may not, then it has no value at all.
Because the bomb over Hiroshima contained four silk bags of cordite to start the chain reaction, and because the exact death toll is not known, Flanagan finds himself writing: ‘all that can be said with absolute certainty is that soaring as pure energy and vaporised fragments towards the heavens that morning…were four silk powder bags.’ Of course it's not factually true that this is all that can be said about Hiroshima, but nor is it really poetically true either. Later he goes even further:
Perhaps the only reply that can be made to Hiroshima is to ask question 7.
Well, no, I'm sorry, but this isn't good enough. It's all very well to pontificate that ‘reality is often no more than the enthusiastic answer we give to our dreams and nightmares’, but when it comes to the nuclear bombing of tens of thousands of people, facts matter, and there is in some sense an intellectual duty to recognise what is real and what isn't.
Still, in the end, this uneasiness I felt only represents one failing in a book chock-full of successes – a lone misfire in a box of intellectual fireworks. Maybe if I trusted Flanagan more, I would have gone along with it more enthusiastically, but I still often have the sense that he is writing sentences which have the shape of something profound without all the substance.
All the same, there are so many strange and wonderful connections here – between cultures, languages, and time periods – that you can't help but come out of it feeling completely energised.
August 28, 2025
When scratching around for ways to review this book – a very difficult task – it’s best we start with a variation of Chekov’s Question 7 – in which the reader is presented with a mathematical problem, only to be asked something different and unanswerable. This is a variation question of the original Chekov Question 7, which is easily found on-line:
"I was chased by 30 dogs, 7 of which were white, 8 grey, and the rest black. Which of my legs was bitten, the right or the left?"
It’s unanswerable, right? Well Chekov believed, writers must ask such questions. Flanagan agrees with him.
Questions such as – “Did the bombing of Hiroshima save lives”? Flanagan’s personal link here is his father, a Japanese POW for four years, but – interestingly, the Hiroshima bomb saved him as he was imprisoned elsewhere in Japan and was thus released, when the Japanese surrendered. If this hadn’t occurred – it’s likely Flanagan’s father would have died (he was on his last legs), and the author of this book would never have been born.
Talk about a very personal example of linking one’s own existence to the bombing of Hiroshima!
When trying to answer such impossible questions, such as the cost/benefit of dropping a nuclear bomb – who knows what the answer is? Do we base our answers solely on what is present around us, in our own life? Or do we have other basic principles to apply?
Flanagan says “The only fools are those with answers.”
Okay, that’s the easy bit. Where you really must strap in for the ride is when Flanagan draws all types of “Butterfly Effect” pieces into this narrative. For example, how H.G. Wells and his philandering (I didn’t realise he was so prolific – he was short too!!........just saying), lead him to author books that influenced scientific and world affairs in such a way that the Manhatton Project was started. To see how – you will need to read book.
This is just one example of how Flanagan expertly weaves his own personal life story, with WWII history, literature, love, Indigenous Tasmanian history, the environment, family relationships and his own near death experience (to name only a few examples of the threads here) – into a narrative that leaves one feeling amazed (by the writing) (am I using too many brackets?), and unsatisfied ,because there are no answers to important questions.
What a head f*ck.
Flanagan’s description of his own near-death experience shook me. It read like a thriller, but on reflection – it made me even less afraid to die. His writing threw me around. Making me less certain about anything really.
Surely matters of love, war, life, and death are above the realm of being able to provide answers. But I agree with Flanagan (and Chekov), we need to keep asking these unanswerable questions, writers need to keep asking these unanswerable questions.
It took me a while, but I ‘grew into’ this book – and at the end, I did not want it to finish.
A tour de force.
5 Blistering Stars
"I was chased by 30 dogs, 7 of which were white, 8 grey, and the rest black. Which of my legs was bitten, the right or the left?"
It’s unanswerable, right? Well Chekov believed, writers must ask such questions. Flanagan agrees with him.
Questions such as – “Did the bombing of Hiroshima save lives”? Flanagan’s personal link here is his father, a Japanese POW for four years, but – interestingly, the Hiroshima bomb saved him as he was imprisoned elsewhere in Japan and was thus released, when the Japanese surrendered. If this hadn’t occurred – it’s likely Flanagan’s father would have died (he was on his last legs), and the author of this book would never have been born.
Talk about a very personal example of linking one’s own existence to the bombing of Hiroshima!
When trying to answer such impossible questions, such as the cost/benefit of dropping a nuclear bomb – who knows what the answer is? Do we base our answers solely on what is present around us, in our own life? Or do we have other basic principles to apply?
Flanagan says “The only fools are those with answers.”
Okay, that’s the easy bit. Where you really must strap in for the ride is when Flanagan draws all types of “Butterfly Effect” pieces into this narrative. For example, how H.G. Wells and his philandering (I didn’t realise he was so prolific – he was short too!!........just saying), lead him to author books that influenced scientific and world affairs in such a way that the Manhatton Project was started. To see how – you will need to read book.
This is just one example of how Flanagan expertly weaves his own personal life story, with WWII history, literature, love, Indigenous Tasmanian history, the environment, family relationships and his own near death experience (to name only a few examples of the threads here) – into a narrative that leaves one feeling amazed (by the writing) (am I using too many brackets?), and unsatisfied ,because there are no answers to important questions.
What a head f*ck.
Flanagan’s description of his own near-death experience shook me. It read like a thriller, but on reflection – it made me even less afraid to die. His writing threw me around. Making me less certain about anything really.
Surely matters of love, war, life, and death are above the realm of being able to provide answers. But I agree with Flanagan (and Chekov), we need to keep asking these unanswerable questions, writers need to keep asking these unanswerable questions.
It took me a while, but I ‘grew into’ this book – and at the end, I did not want it to finish.
A tour de force.
5 Blistering Stars
April 14, 2024
‘Experience is but a moment. Making sense of that moment is a life.’
In Richard Flanagan’s own words, this book is ‘no more than a love note to my parents and my island home, a world that has vanished’, but indeed it IS more than that. Part simple memoir, part Labatut-esque lightly fictionalised history that presents a concatenation of events with the bombing of Hiroshima at its centre, and which ultimately results in Flanagan’s own birth.
The simple memoir — the ‘love note’ — is easily the stronger portion of the book for me. It displays a restraint I have not seen before in Flanagan’s work and yet is powerfully emotional. Portraits of his parents, assorted relatives, and a Tasmanian way of life passing out of living memory are rendered with economical clarity — ‘My father remembered how the coming of electric light killed ghost stories’ — while encompassing too, the much more ancient way of life that preceded it: ‘If this book were the forty thousand years (Aboriginal people) have existed on this island, Europeans would enter the story only in the last page and a half.’
Braided through this personal memoir is a daisy chain of historical events, connecting H.G. Wells’ writing of The World Set Free to the creation of the bomb it prophesied. This section is also very well done, although it is more straightforward and minimal in comparison to Benjamin Labatut’s complex webs of connections, and suffers a little for the comparison. I bristled a little at Flanagan’s tendency to assign cause-and-effect (‘a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me’) to multifactorial events, even while admiring the artistic result.
As someone with a strong bias towards fiction, it comes as a nice surprise that this non-fiction work is my favourite of Flanagan’s books so far. 4.5 stars.
In Richard Flanagan’s own words, this book is ‘no more than a love note to my parents and my island home, a world that has vanished’, but indeed it IS more than that. Part simple memoir, part Labatut-esque lightly fictionalised history that presents a concatenation of events with the bombing of Hiroshima at its centre, and which ultimately results in Flanagan’s own birth.
The simple memoir — the ‘love note’ — is easily the stronger portion of the book for me. It displays a restraint I have not seen before in Flanagan’s work and yet is powerfully emotional. Portraits of his parents, assorted relatives, and a Tasmanian way of life passing out of living memory are rendered with economical clarity — ‘My father remembered how the coming of electric light killed ghost stories’ — while encompassing too, the much more ancient way of life that preceded it: ‘If this book were the forty thousand years (Aboriginal people) have existed on this island, Europeans would enter the story only in the last page and a half.’
Braided through this personal memoir is a daisy chain of historical events, connecting H.G. Wells’ writing of The World Set Free to the creation of the bomb it prophesied. This section is also very well done, although it is more straightforward and minimal in comparison to Benjamin Labatut’s complex webs of connections, and suffers a little for the comparison. I bristled a little at Flanagan’s tendency to assign cause-and-effect (‘a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me’) to multifactorial events, even while admiring the artistic result.
As someone with a strong bias towards fiction, it comes as a nice surprise that this non-fiction work is my favourite of Flanagan’s books so far. 4.5 stars.
March 23, 2025
I knew Question 7 was out there but knew nothing about it,and I think that’s the best way to approach this book.
If you google it, you will find references about where the actual ‘Question 7’ comes from. Resist. Go in blind.
This is a tapestry of different genres and narratives, and I also learned what is meant by ‘auto-fiction’. Only a writer of Richard Flanagan’s calibre can succeed in meshing it all in such an engrossing manner. He is an authority on the beauty and past horrors of Tasmania. His love and knowledge of our Island State, and its awful history, is on full display here.
Part way through, my buddy reader, @Marge Moen, pre-empted a 5-star rating. I was unsure I would be able to match her enthusiasm. Given the format was sometimes frustrating and the links between the narratives were a mix of tenuous and brilliance, it was only when I finished the read that I had my own 5-star physical reaction.
If you google it, you will find references about where the actual ‘Question 7’ comes from. Resist. Go in blind.
This is a tapestry of different genres and narratives, and I also learned what is meant by ‘auto-fiction’. Only a writer of Richard Flanagan’s calibre can succeed in meshing it all in such an engrossing manner. He is an authority on the beauty and past horrors of Tasmania. His love and knowledge of our Island State, and its awful history, is on full display here.
Part way through, my buddy reader, @Marge Moen, pre-empted a 5-star rating. I was unsure I would be able to match her enthusiasm. Given the format was sometimes frustrating and the links between the narratives were a mix of tenuous and brilliance, it was only when I finished the read that I had my own 5-star physical reaction.
September 21, 2025
“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?”
~ Question 7 by Anton Chekhov
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
~ Rumi
Leave the school arithmetics, historical numbers and statistics, life metrics and death tolls at the door.
This is the field.
Follow the descendant of convicts on the island of Tasmania. There is a powerful life force on the other side of ghosts.
Follow the 4-year old boy enchanted and terrorized by the ballet of waves outside a tiny beach shack. There is a powerful life force on the other side of the dunes.
Follow the little boy whose hearing difficulties make him acutely aware of how it feels to be othered. There is a powerful life force on the other side of childhood.
Follow the son of a POW in the Second World War, whose only lesson he imparted his six children after four years of brutality in the Japanese prison camps was to love even harder and stand up for the weak. There is a powerful life force on the other side of evil.
Follow the 21-year old river guide who met his first death at the hands of rapids in the Franklin River. There is a powerful life force on the other side of dying.
A love song. An incantation. A gathering.
A memoir. A fiction. A reckoning.
A book unlike anything I have ever read.
Possibly my favorite read of the year.
Follow Richard Flanagan.
He’s waiting for you in the field.
~ Question 7 by Anton Chekhov
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
~ Rumi
Leave the school arithmetics, historical numbers and statistics, life metrics and death tolls at the door.
This is the field.
Follow the descendant of convicts on the island of Tasmania. There is a powerful life force on the other side of ghosts.
Follow the 4-year old boy enchanted and terrorized by the ballet of waves outside a tiny beach shack. There is a powerful life force on the other side of the dunes.
Follow the little boy whose hearing difficulties make him acutely aware of how it feels to be othered. There is a powerful life force on the other side of childhood.
Follow the son of a POW in the Second World War, whose only lesson he imparted his six children after four years of brutality in the Japanese prison camps was to love even harder and stand up for the weak. There is a powerful life force on the other side of evil.
Follow the 21-year old river guide who met his first death at the hands of rapids in the Franklin River. There is a powerful life force on the other side of dying.
A love song. An incantation. A gathering.
A memoir. A fiction. A reckoning.
A book unlike anything I have ever read.
Possibly my favorite read of the year.
Follow Richard Flanagan.
He’s waiting for you in the field.
December 3, 2024
A splendid and extraordinary book; one that touched my heart in many ways. It is uncategorizable, part memoir and part history, enhanced with a dollop of autofiction. In brilliant prose, Flanagan addresses some of the most significant themes of the 19th and 20th centuries, while painting loving portraits of his homeland and his parents.
These are the key elements of the book: Flanagan was born on Tasmania. His father was a slave labor POW in Japan during WWII. H.G. Wells had an intense relationship with Rebecca West. In the 1930's, physicist Leo Szilard developed the idea for nuclear chain reactions. And when he was 21, Flanagan almost died in a kayaking accident.
From these seemingly unrelated facts, Flanagan creates a tribute to Tasmania, sharing his love for the place and also his pain when reflecting on its conflict past, the genocide of its indigenous population, and the destruction of its rainforests. In parallel, he shares deeply loving descriptions of his hardworking parents, different from one another but both representative of Tasmania, witnesses to the changes to the country over the course of the 20th century.
The book captures Flanagan's efforts to understand his place in the world he inherited from them. "Experience is but a moment. Making sense of that moment is a life." He has done this so effectively that it is unsurprising that he previously won the Booker for fiction and now the Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction.
His message, and the incomparable way in which he expresses it, have affected me profoundly. Not just the sense of a well-told story, but a deeper connection to the beauty and terror of the world we inhabit. This may sound melodramatic, but the truth is that my eyes are filling with tears as I type this. Obviously it won't affect everyone the same way but for me reading it was a remarkable experience.
Oh yes, about Question 7 of the title. It is taken from this Chekhov parody of a typical examination question:
"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?"
These are the key elements of the book: Flanagan was born on Tasmania. His father was a slave labor POW in Japan during WWII. H.G. Wells had an intense relationship with Rebecca West. In the 1930's, physicist Leo Szilard developed the idea for nuclear chain reactions. And when he was 21, Flanagan almost died in a kayaking accident.
From these seemingly unrelated facts, Flanagan creates a tribute to Tasmania, sharing his love for the place and also his pain when reflecting on its conflict past, the genocide of its indigenous population, and the destruction of its rainforests. In parallel, he shares deeply loving descriptions of his hardworking parents, different from one another but both representative of Tasmania, witnesses to the changes to the country over the course of the 20th century.
The book captures Flanagan's efforts to understand his place in the world he inherited from them. "Experience is but a moment. Making sense of that moment is a life." He has done this so effectively that it is unsurprising that he previously won the Booker for fiction and now the Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction.
His message, and the incomparable way in which he expresses it, have affected me profoundly. Not just the sense of a well-told story, but a deeper connection to the beauty and terror of the world we inhabit. This may sound melodramatic, but the truth is that my eyes are filling with tears as I type this. Obviously it won't affect everyone the same way but for me reading it was a remarkable experience.
Oh yes, about Question 7 of the title. It is taken from this Chekhov parody of a typical examination question:
"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?"
November 25, 2023
As someone who has read all of Flanagan's earlier books, I was initially a little puzzled by this one. It seemed to be retracing previous ground. He had dealt with his near-death experience when he almost drowned in the Franklin River in fictional form in Death of a River Guide (1994), where the death of the titular character forms the frame for rest of the novel. His Booker Prize winner, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) was clearly both inspired and informed by the experiences of his father Arch as a POW and slave labourer in Burma and Japan. And he drew on his experience of the death of his mother Helen in The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2021). So I wondered why he decided to return to examine all three of these elements in his life in this memoir. But more puzzling were the other focuses of the book. What did Chekov's short stories, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the life of Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard and the love affair between H.G. Wells and Rebecca West have to do with Flanagan's biography?
But I knew how Flanagan can weave a story, so I trusted he would bring these seemingly totally unconnected elements together. And he does. The result is a deeply thoughtful, lyrical, often raw and profoundly wise meditation on life, death and love.
The connections between the elements I initially found odd and how they relate to the lives of Flanagan and his parents and their respective deaths comes slowly into view and is finally fully interwoven in the ninth chapter. In an age of bestselling lowbrow celebrity autobiographies, this is genuine philosophical memoir and a mature writer mustering his powers at their height to turn and confront some grim and painful aspects of his life that he had previously kept at bay though the distance of fictional treatment. The climax of this is the final section, which gives a detailed, harrowing and genuinely terrifying account of his near-drowning as a young man. This is something he tells us he had previously never fully confronted and the catharsis of his writing makes the impact of this ending to the book all the more moving.
I once wrote a short (affectionate) parody of Flanagan's fiction, which featured a bloke seeing visions of drunken possums and wallabies in a Hobart pub and then going outside to die in the rain. Some of his fiction can come across as very grim and often melancholic. This is quite a contrast to seeing or hearing the author speak or give interviews, where his gentle, wry and self-effacing good humour is very clear; Flanagan, in person, is very funny. Perhaps it's because I listened to the audio book of Question 7 (read by the author himself) while on a series of long drives, but that kindly humour shines through far more clearly in this work.
The result of this combination of humour, erudition, meditation, perspective and raw honesty is, in the end, genuine wisdom. I hope we get many more books from Richard Flanagan, but this one will certainly remain one of his very best.
But I knew how Flanagan can weave a story, so I trusted he would bring these seemingly totally unconnected elements together. And he does. The result is a deeply thoughtful, lyrical, often raw and profoundly wise meditation on life, death and love.
The connections between the elements I initially found odd and how they relate to the lives of Flanagan and his parents and their respective deaths comes slowly into view and is finally fully interwoven in the ninth chapter. In an age of bestselling lowbrow celebrity autobiographies, this is genuine philosophical memoir and a mature writer mustering his powers at their height to turn and confront some grim and painful aspects of his life that he had previously kept at bay though the distance of fictional treatment. The climax of this is the final section, which gives a detailed, harrowing and genuinely terrifying account of his near-drowning as a young man. This is something he tells us he had previously never fully confronted and the catharsis of his writing makes the impact of this ending to the book all the more moving.
I once wrote a short (affectionate) parody of Flanagan's fiction, which featured a bloke seeing visions of drunken possums and wallabies in a Hobart pub and then going outside to die in the rain. Some of his fiction can come across as very grim and often melancholic. This is quite a contrast to seeing or hearing the author speak or give interviews, where his gentle, wry and self-effacing good humour is very clear; Flanagan, in person, is very funny. Perhaps it's because I listened to the audio book of Question 7 (read by the author himself) while on a series of long drives, but that kindly humour shines through far more clearly in this work.
The result of this combination of humour, erudition, meditation, perspective and raw honesty is, in the end, genuine wisdom. I hope we get many more books from Richard Flanagan, but this one will certainly remain one of his very best.
January 2, 2024
This memoir is about all the chain reactions and circles of life, how one event leads to another event and back. It’s about Richard Flanagan’s mother and father, and family. It’s about Tasmania and history and genocide and convicts and nature and all those influences. It’s also about his father’s experience as a prisoner of the Japanese, as a slave worker in a coal mine in Japan when the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima. If that hadn’t happened his father would probably have died in Japan and so he’d never have been born. So the memoir goes back to HG Wells and his relationship with Rebecca West and the writing of the book The World Set Free and his imagined invention the atomic bomb. There’s much more about the scientific developments as it’s such a major event and the scientists involved, mainly Leo Szilard. The book finishes with Flanagan’s near death experience in the Franklin River.
This is beautifully written and I found it incredibly hard to put down. I enjoyed reading about his experiences at Oxford for instance. The stories about his family are moving and heartfelt. I loved it.
This is beautifully written and I found it incredibly hard to put down. I enjoyed reading about his experiences at Oxford for instance. The stories about his family are moving and heartfelt. I loved it.
May 8, 2025
I am not perceptive enough to write a comprehensive review of this amazing and unique memoir, but I can say with certainty that Richard Flanagan’s writing is beyond suburb. This is a recounting that weaves together the history of the atom bomb (starting with H. G. Wells), to slave labor of POW’s in Japan (the author’s father), to daily family life in Tasmania, to the genocide of the Aboriginal Tasmanian people, and to the near death experience (by drowning) of the author as a young man. It is an ode to families and Tasmania and an analysis of mass destruction and death as well as individual death. It displays how history repeats itself. It is different from, and more beautiful and thought provoking than, any “memoir” I have ever read.
June 16, 2025
Did you enjoy The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut? Do you like novels that feel like AI constructed Wikipedia entries but dumbed down enough to make them very easy to read? Do you like to be spoonfed profound thoughts wrapped up in romantic ideas about life being connected by a magical thread, a profound chain? Then you'll love this.
I didn't.
I mean, look, it's not terrible and I found it mostly inoffensive and fairly entertaining to read. But this is not literature in any way shape or form. This is a book by committee, a paint-by-numbers exercise in cynically tapping into a desire for meaning and beauty. Firstly, it sells itself as memoir, life-writing, autofiction, but, in truth, it's just standard fiction. Flanagan starts by telling us about his father being a Japanese prisoner of war. Then he moves on to the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Then he goes on a tangent about H.G. Wells falling in love with Rebecca West and writing a book which predicted nuclear weapons. Then back to his father. Then back to H. G. Wells. Then he moves on to Leo Szilard, physicist who was influenced by Wells' book and how these ideas are all intrinsically linked, related, informing. And so on and so forth. Like I said, if you've read The Maniac, you'll probably get the gist of what this book is doing (Von Neumann is even brought up at one point for that matter).
I just don't like these kinds of books. There is something false and inauthentic about them. I don't mind someone like Seabald going on tangents of personal interest and thought, here and there, but he does it with a certain style, flourish, and fluidity. He is telling a story where the links are natural and small. But these kinds of books (Wikipedia novels I call them) do not have that same level of sincerity or care. Books containing flights of fancy, by definition, ought to feel as though the thoughts came from nowhere, transpired via a process of natural wonder and awe, and were not painstakingly cultivated and mined. Otherwise, the whole thing feels like it was created by an algorithm designed to exploit human sentimentality. It's like Flanagan prompted AI with the words: 'write a book that connects H.G. Wells to Szilard to nuclear power to my father, etc and make it as soppy as possible'. Don't get me wrong, it's mostly fun to read but I just feel so little humanity behind any of it (even when you make it about your father and the nightmare of nuclear holocaust). The most fun parts of the novel are unquestionably when he digresses onto the subject of Wells or Szilard, ultimately making his and his father's story somewhat dull by comparison. If anything this book has made me wonder why history hasn't been a little harsher on the obvious sexual predatory instincts of H. G. Wells (but that's a story for another day). Those digressions aside, the book really does hit you over the head with the idea of connection, of life being a rich tapestry where one thread spirals into the next. All things which frankly... are not true. They are a simplification of life which I find maudlin and false.
Nonetheless, I did kinda enjoy it. But only in the same way that I ate and enjoyed a cheeseburger meal from McDonald's the other day. Despite the satisfying taste, the umami tang, the salty oil, the refreshing fizz of the overly sweetened coke, I couldn't help but feel that this delicious burger only existed because of the bored, dead-behind-the-eyes mechanical movements of several ennui suffering teenagers.
I hate books like this. Sure I enjoyed reading it for the most part. But still... I hate books like this.
I didn't.
I mean, look, it's not terrible and I found it mostly inoffensive and fairly entertaining to read. But this is not literature in any way shape or form. This is a book by committee, a paint-by-numbers exercise in cynically tapping into a desire for meaning and beauty. Firstly, it sells itself as memoir, life-writing, autofiction, but, in truth, it's just standard fiction. Flanagan starts by telling us about his father being a Japanese prisoner of war. Then he moves on to the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Then he goes on a tangent about H.G. Wells falling in love with Rebecca West and writing a book which predicted nuclear weapons. Then back to his father. Then back to H. G. Wells. Then he moves on to Leo Szilard, physicist who was influenced by Wells' book and how these ideas are all intrinsically linked, related, informing. And so on and so forth. Like I said, if you've read The Maniac, you'll probably get the gist of what this book is doing (Von Neumann is even brought up at one point for that matter).
I just don't like these kinds of books. There is something false and inauthentic about them. I don't mind someone like Seabald going on tangents of personal interest and thought, here and there, but he does it with a certain style, flourish, and fluidity. He is telling a story where the links are natural and small. But these kinds of books (Wikipedia novels I call them) do not have that same level of sincerity or care. Books containing flights of fancy, by definition, ought to feel as though the thoughts came from nowhere, transpired via a process of natural wonder and awe, and were not painstakingly cultivated and mined. Otherwise, the whole thing feels like it was created by an algorithm designed to exploit human sentimentality. It's like Flanagan prompted AI with the words: 'write a book that connects H.G. Wells to Szilard to nuclear power to my father, etc and make it as soppy as possible'. Don't get me wrong, it's mostly fun to read but I just feel so little humanity behind any of it (even when you make it about your father and the nightmare of nuclear holocaust). The most fun parts of the novel are unquestionably when he digresses onto the subject of Wells or Szilard, ultimately making his and his father's story somewhat dull by comparison. If anything this book has made me wonder why history hasn't been a little harsher on the obvious sexual predatory instincts of H. G. Wells (but that's a story for another day). Those digressions aside, the book really does hit you over the head with the idea of connection, of life being a rich tapestry where one thread spirals into the next. All things which frankly... are not true. They are a simplification of life which I find maudlin and false.
Nonetheless, I did kinda enjoy it. But only in the same way that I ate and enjoyed a cheeseburger meal from McDonald's the other day. Despite the satisfying taste, the umami tang, the salty oil, the refreshing fizz of the overly sweetened coke, I couldn't help but feel that this delicious burger only existed because of the bored, dead-behind-the-eyes mechanical movements of several ennui suffering teenagers.
I hate books like this. Sure I enjoyed reading it for the most part. But still... I hate books like this.
November 20, 2024
Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction, worthily so and great to see a novel winning that prize.
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:
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:
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 this essay by Siena Stubbs, which suggests a fourth tense in Yolŋu:
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.
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 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?
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 this 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.
April 8, 2025
5★
“When it came to which weapon of mass destruction, the atom bomb was simply the final choice.
. . .
While the world still grieves for the dead of Hiroshima, outside Japan who grieves for the firebombing of Tokyo, which saw perhaps even more die from conventional bombs than the first atomic bomb—an estimated 100,000 victims? Which is the greater war crime? Who do we remember and who do we forget?”
This amazing combination of family memoir and historical research, has been simmering away for a long time in the uniquely imaginative mind of one of my favourite authors. It is a thoughtful reflection about connectedness and how remarkable it is that he was born at all, considering his father’s harrowing wartime experiences during WWII.
“By the time Thomas Ferebee released the lever over Hiroshima, my father had somehow survived more than three years of Japanese internment. He had somehow survived Changi and the Death Railway.”
When the bomb fell, his father was a prisoner of war and slave labourer in the Ohama Coal Mine at Hiroshima. How did that man return to Tasmania, raise a family, and lead a seemingly normal day-to-day life?
Flanagan writes much about his father, his family, his youth, and his own death experience when he drowned as a river guide. Around that is the long history of Tasmania, particularly its dark days as a violent penal colony that slaughtered and tried to eradicate the local Aborigines. More questions.
He writes about a world of love and passion and brutality and consequences. He quotes Russian author Anton Chekhov about the purpose of literature.
“One of Chekhov’s earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov’s question 7 is typical:
That is Flanagan’s real question. Why? This is almost the way children will keep saying, “But, why?” no matter what answer you give them. With kids, it's partly because they can keep you talking and partly because no answer is ever enough… until of course you get to the usual grown-up’s last word, “Because I said so!”
Flanagan was born and raised in Tasmania, and much of his focus is on his unusual father, who comfortably blended Catholicism with his belief that people return to the world as animals.
After his father's death, a family letter said his father’s mother had Aboriginal heritage, but it would have been kept secret in those days. His father was dark enough that he was nicknamed “Nugget” (a shoe polish) and “half-caste”. Could that explain anything about the man, his keeping things to himself, his endurance?
Flanagan's great-great- grandfather, Thomas Flanagan, came as a convict slave to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). It was the worst of all convict hellholes, if such a thing can be measured. What stuff was he made of that he survived?
How might inherited and/or intergenerational trauma affect descendants? Richard’s father was obviously made of strong stuff (his mother was a bright, resourceful woman, too).
Researching his questions about the bomb, Flanagan explores a warren of rabbit holes, including the story of how science fiction writer H.G. Wells's long love affair with Rebecca West influenced his writing, which in turn inspired a student of Einstein, which in turn led to the development of nuclear fission and Hiroshima.
“The US only did what it did creating the atom bomb because a man called Leo Szilard, haunted by questions, persuaded its president it should and then helped make the impossible possible. And Leo Szilard only did what he did because he had once read a novel. The novel was written out of a terror of love and it terrified Leo Szilard and entranced him in equal measure until it became his destiny. The novel was written by H. G. Wells.”
He writes at length about the Wells-West affair and of Leo Szilard’s background, fictionalising scenes as he does. About Wells seeing West, he writes:
“…women made him quiver like a fish and the one now smiling at him from the sitting room door—top teeth slightly prominent in her gypsy face and her bottom somewhat more prominent in a blue silk hobble skirt—electrified him. She was a question mark he intended to answer.”
He also covers Leo Szilard's own story, how his thinking was nudged as he watched traffic lights change, how he discovered the nuclear chain reaction, what happened to the patent and how. How it ended up in American hands.
He moves back and forth between stories, always marking breaks between thoughts, chapters, essays, reminiscences. It’s easy to follow and makes sense when we accept that
“all writing is trapped in tenses when life isn’t. Life is always happening and has happened and will happen, and the only writing that can have any worth confounds time and stands outside of it, swims with it and flies with it and dives deep within it, seeking the answer to one insistent question: who loves longer?”
In the acknowledgments, he writes about something I’ve heard of before, which relates to an Aboriginal concept of time.
“Some years ago I was sent a remarkable essay by a then eighteen-year-old Yolnju woman, Siena Stubbs, about the use of a fourth tense in the Yolnju language. It was, in its own way, the equivalent of Szilard’s traffic lights for my thinking, and it informs this book deeply.”
I love Flanagan’s writing. I was unsure if this non-fiction book was going to be too much dry information. How silly. Of course I found it fascinating. I listened to the author read a lot of it, because he has a manner of speech which seems to give his words even more impact. It’s worth finding one of the many interviews and podcasts out there.
But to really appreciate it, I had to read it for myself as well. Wonderful.
“When it came to which weapon of mass destruction, the atom bomb was simply the final choice.
. . .
While the world still grieves for the dead of Hiroshima, outside Japan who grieves for the firebombing of Tokyo, which saw perhaps even more die from conventional bombs than the first atomic bomb—an estimated 100,000 victims? Which is the greater war crime? Who do we remember and who do we forget?”
This amazing combination of family memoir and historical research, has been simmering away for a long time in the uniquely imaginative mind of one of my favourite authors. It is a thoughtful reflection about connectedness and how remarkable it is that he was born at all, considering his father’s harrowing wartime experiences during WWII.
“By the time Thomas Ferebee released the lever over Hiroshima, my father had somehow survived more than three years of Japanese internment. He had somehow survived Changi and the Death Railway.”
When the bomb fell, his father was a prisoner of war and slave labourer in the Ohama Coal Mine at Hiroshima. How did that man return to Tasmania, raise a family, and lead a seemingly normal day-to-day life?
Flanagan writes much about his father, his family, his youth, and his own death experience when he drowned as a river guide. Around that is the long history of Tasmania, particularly its dark days as a violent penal colony that slaughtered and tried to eradicate the local Aborigines. More questions.
He writes about a world of love and passion and brutality and consequences. He quotes Russian author Anton Chekhov about the purpose of literature.
“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 3 a.m. in order to reach station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7 p.m. 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?
That’s question 7.”
That is Flanagan’s real question. Why? This is almost the way children will keep saying, “But, why?” no matter what answer you give them. With kids, it's partly because they can keep you talking and partly because no answer is ever enough… until of course you get to the usual grown-up’s last word, “Because I said so!”
Flanagan was born and raised in Tasmania, and much of his focus is on his unusual father, who comfortably blended Catholicism with his belief that people return to the world as animals.
After his father's death, a family letter said his father’s mother had Aboriginal heritage, but it would have been kept secret in those days. His father was dark enough that he was nicknamed “Nugget” (a shoe polish) and “half-caste”. Could that explain anything about the man, his keeping things to himself, his endurance?
Flanagan's great-great- grandfather, Thomas Flanagan, came as a convict slave to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). It was the worst of all convict hellholes, if such a thing can be measured. What stuff was he made of that he survived?
How might inherited and/or intergenerational trauma affect descendants? Richard’s father was obviously made of strong stuff (his mother was a bright, resourceful woman, too).
Researching his questions about the bomb, Flanagan explores a warren of rabbit holes, including the story of how science fiction writer H.G. Wells's long love affair with Rebecca West influenced his writing, which in turn inspired a student of Einstein, which in turn led to the development of nuclear fission and Hiroshima.
“The US only did what it did creating the atom bomb because a man called Leo Szilard, haunted by questions, persuaded its president it should and then helped make the impossible possible. And Leo Szilard only did what he did because he had once read a novel. The novel was written out of a terror of love and it terrified Leo Szilard and entranced him in equal measure until it became his destiny. The novel was written by H. G. Wells.”
He writes at length about the Wells-West affair and of Leo Szilard’s background, fictionalising scenes as he does. About Wells seeing West, he writes:
“…women made him quiver like a fish and the one now smiling at him from the sitting room door—top teeth slightly prominent in her gypsy face and her bottom somewhat more prominent in a blue silk hobble skirt—electrified him. She was a question mark he intended to answer.”
He also covers Leo Szilard's own story, how his thinking was nudged as he watched traffic lights change, how he discovered the nuclear chain reaction, what happened to the patent and how. How it ended up in American hands.
He moves back and forth between stories, always marking breaks between thoughts, chapters, essays, reminiscences. It’s easy to follow and makes sense when we accept that
“all writing is trapped in tenses when life isn’t. Life is always happening and has happened and will happen, and the only writing that can have any worth confounds time and stands outside of it, swims with it and flies with it and dives deep within it, seeking the answer to one insistent question: who loves longer?”
In the acknowledgments, he writes about something I’ve heard of before, which relates to an Aboriginal concept of time.
“Some years ago I was sent a remarkable essay by a then eighteen-year-old Yolnju woman, Siena Stubbs, about the use of a fourth tense in the Yolnju language. It was, in its own way, the equivalent of Szilard’s traffic lights for my thinking, and it informs this book deeply.”
I love Flanagan’s writing. I was unsure if this non-fiction book was going to be too much dry information. How silly. Of course I found it fascinating. I listened to the author read a lot of it, because he has a manner of speech which seems to give his words even more impact. It’s worth finding one of the many interviews and podcasts out there.
But to really appreciate it, I had to read it for myself as well. Wonderful.
August 12, 2025
I read this a few months back, so forget some of the detail, but I definitely remember how moved and interested I was by this genre-bending, highly philosophical, memoir-like consideration of the meaning of life, wide-ranging and intelligent in gathering up the disparate elements that make a life. The author visited the place where his father barely survived as a prisoner of war in a Japanese internment camp (and was forced to participate in an excruciating “forgiveness” meeting, staged by local media, with the most brutal of the camp guards), leading to philosophical pondering about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which, as horrendous as it was, saved his father’s life and led to the author’s very existence. I now forget the narrative path that led Flanagan to recount his near-drowning experience as a young river guide wedged in a kayak beneath rapidly flowing water, but that was absolutely both hair-raising and captivating as a story. This book roamed so widely, leading me so willingly everywhere this magnificent writer took me. I will definitely be re-reading it at some point.
October 22, 2023
I devoured this book in 24 hours. There are so many concurrent narratives within which alludes to history and time, associations and consequences. Each person and their influence on the past through their actions is masterfully weaved together to create an impressive work of non-fiction.
August 13, 2025
Two weeks after finishing the extraordinary Question 7 I have decided that the best thing for me to do is to confine myself to talking about two of the main ideas it has left with me, and to rely on other reviewers to expand on the thoughts that underpin Flanagan’s telling of a string of events which he has connected and on which he has thought deeply.
These connections are unexpected, have occurred uniquely to Flanagan, and take time to understand when you read the stories that make up the book; the ideas that inspire them and simultaneously arise from them.
I thought of the book as like a string of cloud puffs, each in its own part of the sky, but all connected by a wisp, a superfine trace. Beautiful, demanding contemplation and an attempt to understand how this could be.
The first of the two main ideas I’m left with is that the most unlikely things can be connected, and that once you have seen the connection it cannot be unseen. (Some of these are mentioned in Joe Murray’s review, which I’ve taken the liberty of pasting in below, with attribution. The links at the end to other reviews give more detail).
The second is Flanagan’s recurring use of a Yolnju Aboriginal concept of time, which has four tenses – the fourth one a connection between past, present and future, something that has happened is still happening and will always happen. He writes about this in his visualisation of the Hiroshima dead as vaporised souls, and about his own near death by drowning when he was 21, something he comes back to in terrifying detail in this book.
In her review, Lisa Hill chose this passage which illuminates this idea of recurring or continuous time:
and: 'what had happened was always happening and would never stop happening'.
And an early qyote: 'Is it because we see our world only darkly that we surround ourselves with lies we call time, history, memory, reality, memory, detail, facts? What if time were plural and so were we?'
Chekov’s question 7, “Who is capable of loving longer, a man or a woman?”, gives the book its enigmatic title. The enigma is unresolvable: the only thing is that love matters.
Review by Joe Murray from the staff of Readings Bookshop in Melbourne, 2023
Sometimes, a work of nonfiction feels like a magic trick. While novels can weave poignant, transcendent stories from little more than an author’s imagination, it is something entirely different, something almost miraculous, when that same transcendence is wrought from the stony face of fact and history, when the reality of memories and moments and lives is somehow coalesced into a thing more beautiful than the sum of its parts. Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is that magic trick made manifest, a profound journey that draws its meandering path through tragedies great and small, from the skies above Hiroshima to the rivers of Tasmania.
Preoccupied, like so many others in recent years, with the staggering atrocities of nuclear warfare and informed by the timeless fourth tense used in the language of the Yolngu people, Flanagan’s writing spirals outwards from that grim morning in August when they dropped the bomb, effortlessly ‘confounding’ time to link each fragment of history responsible for our present. Before Hiroshima, there was Leo Szilard, the first scientist to see the destructive potential of nuclear chain reactions, who was in turn inspired by H.G. Wells, whose imagination created the first visions of the atomic bomb. After Hiroshima is Flanagan himself, born of a father whose life, as a Japanese prisoner of war, was saved by the blast that killed countless others. From Wells to Szilard to Hiroshima to father to son – Flanagan presents history as a line of cause and effect that becomes a circle when inscribed on the land of Tasmania, whose bloody history of attempted genocide inspires one author who in turn, births another, haunted by that same genocide. In the words that echo throughout the book: ‘life is always happening and has happened and will happen.’
There’s more in this magnificent work I haven’t mentioned: questions of love and Chekhov, memories that animate and contextualise Flanagan’s fiction, and impassioned calls for unity and resistance alike. The ideas shine, the prose dazzles, but is that really a surprise? In truth, Question 7 cannot be fully captured by any writing except its own: like any magic trick, you must see it for yourself. From. https://www.readings.com.au/reviews/q...
Links to excellent Australian reviews
https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/01/10/q... Lisa Hill
https://theconversation.com/the-atomi... Dan Dixon
https://whisperinggums.com/2024/03/03...
These connections are unexpected, have occurred uniquely to Flanagan, and take time to understand when you read the stories that make up the book; the ideas that inspire them and simultaneously arise from them.
I thought of the book as like a string of cloud puffs, each in its own part of the sky, but all connected by a wisp, a superfine trace. Beautiful, demanding contemplation and an attempt to understand how this could be.
The first of the two main ideas I’m left with is that the most unlikely things can be connected, and that once you have seen the connection it cannot be unseen. (Some of these are mentioned in Joe Murray’s review, which I’ve taken the liberty of pasting in below, with attribution. The links at the end to other reviews give more detail).
The second is Flanagan’s recurring use of a Yolnju Aboriginal concept of time, which has four tenses – the fourth one a connection between past, present and future, something that has happened is still happening and will always happen. He writes about this in his visualisation of the Hiroshima dead as vaporised souls, and about his own near death by drowning when he was 21, something he comes back to in terrifying detail in this book.
In her review, Lisa Hill chose this passage which illuminates this idea of recurring or continuous time:
It was only many years after it happened that I began to understand. That what occurred is still occurring. I wrote about the story in one way a long time ago for another novel, my first. Though I tried to be honest, it was still happening and so it was dishonest. That’s what I couldn’t see then that I see now, that though it happened then it’s still happening now and it won’t ever stop happening, and that writing about it, that writing about anything, can’t be an opinion about what happened as if it had already happened when it is still happening, still unintelligible, still mysterious, and all writing is trapped in tenses when life isn’t. Life is always happening and has happened and will happen, and the only writing that can have any worth confounds time and stands outside of it, swims with it and flies with it and dives deep within it, seeking the answer to one question: who loves longer? (p.99).
and: 'what had happened was always happening and would never stop happening'.
And an early qyote: 'Is it because we see our world only darkly that we surround ourselves with lies we call time, history, memory, reality, memory, detail, facts? What if time were plural and so were we?'
Chekov’s question 7, “Who is capable of loving longer, a man or a woman?”, gives the book its enigmatic title. The enigma is unresolvable: the only thing is that love matters.
Review by Joe Murray from the staff of Readings Bookshop in Melbourne, 2023
Sometimes, a work of nonfiction feels like a magic trick. While novels can weave poignant, transcendent stories from little more than an author’s imagination, it is something entirely different, something almost miraculous, when that same transcendence is wrought from the stony face of fact and history, when the reality of memories and moments and lives is somehow coalesced into a thing more beautiful than the sum of its parts. Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is that magic trick made manifest, a profound journey that draws its meandering path through tragedies great and small, from the skies above Hiroshima to the rivers of Tasmania.
Preoccupied, like so many others in recent years, with the staggering atrocities of nuclear warfare and informed by the timeless fourth tense used in the language of the Yolngu people, Flanagan’s writing spirals outwards from that grim morning in August when they dropped the bomb, effortlessly ‘confounding’ time to link each fragment of history responsible for our present. Before Hiroshima, there was Leo Szilard, the first scientist to see the destructive potential of nuclear chain reactions, who was in turn inspired by H.G. Wells, whose imagination created the first visions of the atomic bomb. After Hiroshima is Flanagan himself, born of a father whose life, as a Japanese prisoner of war, was saved by the blast that killed countless others. From Wells to Szilard to Hiroshima to father to son – Flanagan presents history as a line of cause and effect that becomes a circle when inscribed on the land of Tasmania, whose bloody history of attempted genocide inspires one author who in turn, births another, haunted by that same genocide. In the words that echo throughout the book: ‘life is always happening and has happened and will happen.’
There’s more in this magnificent work I haven’t mentioned: questions of love and Chekhov, memories that animate and contextualise Flanagan’s fiction, and impassioned calls for unity and resistance alike. The ideas shine, the prose dazzles, but is that really a surprise? In truth, Question 7 cannot be fully captured by any writing except its own: like any magic trick, you must see it for yourself. From. https://www.readings.com.au/reviews/q...
Links to excellent Australian reviews
https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/01/10/q... Lisa Hill
https://theconversation.com/the-atomi... Dan Dixon
https://whisperinggums.com/2024/03/03...
March 9, 2024
There's nothing I can say about this book that hasn't already been said - beautifully written, endlessly fascinating and just so moving that I won't even try to quantify it. How this could all be achieved within 280 pages is beyond my comprehension. One to treasure and anticipate multiple re-reads.
December 21, 2024
What matters in life?
I thought more and more about my parents, and, you know, I grew up in this little mining village, very remote, in the wilderness of Tasmania and the answer they made to the horrors of that island, which had the closest thing to a successful genocide in human history, which had a sort of white slave system that was called convictism, and they came from poor backgrounds and the answer they made to that was to practice an idea of love which, when I was young, I thought somewhat naive, but they fought for that love and they practiced that love and over decades it became a truth and a reality and it was, I think, a form of magic, and they the magicians. And I wanted to write about how kindness and goodness matter so much because it's not reducible to politics, it's not religion, but it is the answer we can make to the emptiness and despair that sometimes grabs hold of us.
Richard Flanagan, in an interview on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme of 20th November 2024
Magic.
I thought more and more about my parents, and, you know, I grew up in this little mining village, very remote, in the wilderness of Tasmania and the answer they made to the horrors of that island, which had the closest thing to a successful genocide in human history, which had a sort of white slave system that was called convictism, and they came from poor backgrounds and the answer they made to that was to practice an idea of love which, when I was young, I thought somewhat naive, but they fought for that love and they practiced that love and over decades it became a truth and a reality and it was, I think, a form of magic, and they the magicians. And I wanted to write about how kindness and goodness matter so much because it's not reducible to politics, it's not religion, but it is the answer we can make to the emptiness and despair that sometimes grabs hold of us.
Richard Flanagan, in an interview on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme of 20th November 2024
Magic.
December 17, 2023
We can’t know anyone apart from what they want to share and in this offering- autobiography, memoir, biography (real and imagined) Flanagan shares his story, and that of the lives that he believes have intersected it. Like rays of light he bounces off things in dark spaces, illuminating moments, events and people. Sometimes the light only creates shadows so he describes what is in that darkness, or imagines it through the use of historical text (relying on other narrators).
Using the indigenous idea of a fourth time dimension (he acknowledges this in his text) he pulls and tugs on the past, present and future and creates a story that weaves in and out of his life. This must have taken a great deal of courage to write, it simultaneously acknowledges the smallness and greatness of each human life. How lucky we are and how we should find moments to be grateful. It is a beautiful tribute to his parents and his island home of Tasmania.
Using the indigenous idea of a fourth time dimension (he acknowledges this in his text) he pulls and tugs on the past, present and future and creates a story that weaves in and out of his life. This must have taken a great deal of courage to write, it simultaneously acknowledges the smallness and greatness of each human life. How lucky we are and how we should find moments to be grateful. It is a beautiful tribute to his parents and his island home of Tasmania.
November 30, 2024
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2024...
“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 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 with such a force that it became a reality that reshaped the world."
Question 7 para mí funciona como un combo con "El mar vivo de los sueños despiertos", o como un complemento, porque ya en su momento cuando a principios de año la leí, aunque claramente es una novela, sí que tuve la impresión de que había mucho de autoficción en ella, o que de alguna forma Flanagan exorcizaba en ella, quizás la muerte de su madre o de su padre y estaba hablando incluso de sí mismo, es tanta la verdad que translucía ese texto. Es una impresión, que se me ha confirmado con Question 7, que tal como él dice en esta primera cita convierte en una carta de amor a sus padres y a Tasmania, pero su habilidad está quizás no tanto en la historia en sí sino en la forma en que consigue traspasar y conectar: "And so at the beginning I learnt this: the words of a book are never the book, the soul of it is everything". "El mar vivo de los sueños despiertos" me tocó porque la sentí muy cercana e igual me he sentido con esta Question 7: doscientas y pico páginas que son una mezcla de memoria personal y famliar, filosofía personal, biografía, historia novelizada y reflexión sobre la creación artistica. Los textos de Flanagan me parecen siempre muy verdaderos, muy cercanos e íntimos, consiguen conmoverme hasta el punto de que me veo identificada y retratada en muchos momentos: “Its in fragments that we find ourselves”. En Question 7, por ejemplo, son especialmente conmovedores los momentos en los que Flanagan habla de sus padres, se retrotrae a experiencias familiares del pasado y los enfrenta a la visión que tiene de ellos cuando ya se han hecho mayores, los convierte en momentos tan íntimos como universales. Es de los pocos autores ahora mismo que se ve muy verdadero y personal, y esto es quizás debido a este estilo tan práctico y poético al mismo tiempo.
"And when she was leaving we somehow ended up sitting in her car and she spoke of how difficult our father was, how since his retirement he would sort out her cupboards and drawers expressing dissatisfaction with the way she kept them. Her cupboards and drawers, her smallest of dominions and one of the few allowed to her. And she began to cry, there on the street, sitting in her car, my tough old mum, crying, her large hands all the time grasping the steering wheel, as though there was still some turning down the road that she might yet take.."
Se puede decir que en Question 7 hay varios hilos conductores, varias lineas argumentales que se entrelazan, confluyen, se alejan y vuelven a conectar en una demostración de ese concepto de que todo está relacionado. Por resumirlo de alguna forma, estos hilos que guían al lector serán tres o cuatro:
"Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings -why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life in the hope that behind it we will find the truth of why.
But there is no truth. There's is only why. And when we look closer we see that behind that why is just another tapestry.
And behind it another, and another, until we arrive at oblivion."
- Por una parte tendremos la linea en torno a la familia Flanagan que vive en Tasmania, sus padres y él mismo profundamente marcado por un padre que fue prisionero de guerra de los japoneses y que participó en la construcción del ferrocarril de la muerte, un tema que Flanagan ya exploraba en su novela “El camino estrecho al norte profundo” que no he leído todavía. Sin embargo, aquí en Question 7, Flanagan no lo noveliza, sino que se aproxima desde el punto de vista de un niño que siempre detectó la profunda huella que aquella experiencia había dejado en su padre, aunque sin encontrar explicación a un cierto comportamiento de un padre que buscaba siempre la soledad, porque su padre nunca habló de su profundo dolor aunque Flanagan ya como adulto indagó en él. Esta experiencia como prisionero/esclavo de guerra también marcará al hijo que ya de adulto recorrerá los mismos lugares e incluso llegará a encontrarse con personas que vivieron la misma experiencia de su padre para llegar a entender ese trauma. Flanagan lo cuenta a flor de piel, pero las mejores páginas de este texto serán aquellos en los nos contará como son ellos, sus padres ya en su vejez.
"It was clear to me even when I was very young that my father was different, that he had passed through something, but what that something was wasn't really talked about. A quiet and reserved man who neither disciplned me nor encouraged me nor damned me nor praised me, he was for the most part vaporous, there and not there, substance and non-substance.
He saw the world aslant. It was for him a great tragicomedy in which the comedy was mad poignant by the tragedy and the tragedy rendered bearable by the comedy. When the subject was sad or serious, he would smile wanly, his face turning inside out, a concertina of wrinkles compressing his eyes into wry sunken currants, and from him would flow a riversong of stories."
- Otra de las lineas argumental hace referencia a la colonización de Tasmania, esa colonización europea sobre los aborígenes de Tasmania que marcaron un genoicidio en sí mismo y que Flanagan conectará con su propia familia y con sus posible sangre aborígen.
"Is It because we see our world only darkly that we surround ourselves with líes we call time, history, reality, memory, detail, facts?"
- Y en el tercer hilo argumental, que podría haber sido el primero, Flanagan hace surgir a HG Wells a través de su novela The world set free conectándola con la historia de Hiroshima, ya que en esta novela en la que todo estalla, Wells predice la guerra nuclear años antes de que siquiera comenzaran las investigaciones hablando de un arma destructiva que lo arrasaría todo a su paso. ¿Y cómo decide Flanagan conectar la historia de Hiroshima, que le interesa contar porque además estará intimamente relacionada con la experiencia de su padre con la del escritor HG Wells? Pues usará el encuentro entre HG Wells y Rebecca West, como momento de inflexión, lo conectados que se sintieron desde el primer momento, pero de quién en un principio Wells huyó: "Meanwhile, Rebecca West was writing of how she could'nt conceive of a person who ran about lighting bonfires but feared the flame. Yet that was HG Wells. But he did not want someone like her, who burnt." El momento justo, imagino que totalmente novelizado dentro de la historia real, en el que Wells besa a Rebecca West frente al escaparate de una librería, será el momento decisivo que hará surgir la novela que luego escribiría. Tras el beso a Rebecca West, Wells, hombre casado, huye aterrado a refugiarse en los Alpes suizos a escribir la novela The world set free. Igual sin este beso/huida a Suiza escapando del terror que le producía enamorarse de la escritora, nunca se habría escrito este libro que predijo el cataclismo de la bomba atómica. “Fiction may be only fancy yet reality is often no more than the enthusiastic answer we give to our deams and nightmares.” La realidad no deja de ser un espejo surgida de la ficción, de nuestros sueños y pesadillas...
“They should never have met, they were destined for each other, he would make her life and destroy her life and she would make her life in spite of his life, he would be an inexhaustible source of love and friendship for her for the next 35 years, he would madden her, he would win her and lose her and win her, she would be the one person he cared to see to the end.
Rebecca West and HG Wells were completely wrong for each other, they were completely right; she saw he wouldn't leave his wife, he saw he needed a wife. He thought love was just common sense, she thought it was a way of losing It, he was for sex without love, she was for the whole damn business. He believed he was reinventing literature as a form of proselytising journalism, while she wrote many years after their affaire ended, as still arguing with him, that art was not a plaything, but a necessity, and the book she wrote , Black Lamb Grey Falcon, reinvented journalism as literature, prefiguring much of what literature would become.
She discovered very early that her chief strenght as a writer was that she wrote as she felt whereas most writers only write as others think. Along with her new name she stole from Ibsen the thoroughly non English idea that ideas make the world spin around..."
Richard Flanagan usa técnicas novelescas para vincular a Wells con su amante y futura pareja, Rebecca West, y con Lee Szilard, cuya lectura de la novela de Wells le hizo ser el primero en darse cuenta de que el poder nuclear podía usarse para hacer una bomba de proporciones aterradoras, la reacción nuclear en cadena, y esta idea se convertirá en un concepto recurrente a lo largo de toda esta obra, así que la novela de Wells será el punto inicial que marcará el comienzo de Hiroshima. Todo está conectado, interrelacionado y una cosa siempre llevará a la otra. De la misma manera que en que está conectado el mundo, así Flanagan conectará Tasmania y el genocidio de los aborígenes, con el internamiento de su padre en los durísimos campos de prisioneros de guerra en el sudeste asiático construyendo una reflexión muy personal, poética y muy lúcida sobre la vida, la memoria, sus ancestros, la huella que la violencia y los traumas dejarán en nosotros: "Does time heal? Time does not always heal. Time scars." Reconozco en Richard Flanagan un escritor único, que no se parece a nadie y el modo en que explora los momentos más duros y devastadores de la humanidad mimetizándolos con los personales igual de traumáticos, están exponiendo claramente que cuando algo ocurre, no solo se ha convertido en parte del pasado sino que sigue siendo parte de nuestro futuro, nada desaparece: la necesidad de olvidar es tan fuerte como la necesidad de recordar, incluso más poderosa...
"As if the need to forget is as strong as the need to remember. Perhaps stronger.
And after oblivion? We return to the stories we call our memories, perplexed, strangers to the ongoing invention that is our life."
El titulo de esta obra proviene de un cuento de Chéjov, “Pregunta de un matemático loco”, una especie de parodia de un problema de matemáticas escolar. La pregunta 7 es: El miércoles 17 de junio de 1881, un tren tenía que salir de la estación A a las 3 de la mañana para llegar a la estación B a las 11 de la noche; sin embargo, justo cuando el tren estaba a punto de partir, llegó una orden de que el tren debía llegar a la estación B a las 7 de la tarde. ¿Quién ama más, un hombre o una mujer?
¿Quién ama más? Será una pregunta recurrente a lo largo de esta obra. Chéjov/Flanagan nos está enfrentando al hecho de no detenernos en lo superficial y mirar más allá de la lógica y la racionalidad de este mundo porque su lógica siempre va a resultar imprevista y surgirá otro nivel que no sabíamos que existía y que probablemente sea la auténtica realidad aunque no la percibamos a simple vista porque vivimos en un mundo de apariencias y existe esa otra realidad que es la de verdad pero que no vemos. Una pregunta sin respuesta, pero Chéjov creía que el papel de la literatura no era dar respuestas sino plantear preguntas necesarias, solo los tontos creen tener las respuestas. Se puede decir que hay otra linea argumental más soterrada y escondida que habla de los ancestros donde Flanagan se detiene en el concepto del tiempo, todo tiempo puede coexistir, los antepasados que estuvieron aquí, seguirán estando aquí: “Life is always happening and has happened and will happen…”. En definitiva, un texto absolutamente devastador, lúcido, y conmovedor. Eso sí, yo lo leería como una extensión de “El mar vivo de los sueños despiertos”
“Perhaps the only reply that can be made to Hiroshima is to ask question 7. If it is a question that can never be answered, it is still the question we must keep asking, if only in order to understand that life is never binary, nor reducible to cant or code, but a mystery we must aprehend. In Chekhovs stories, the only fools are those with answers.
"Chekhov wrote question 7 is about how the world from which we presume to derive meaning and purpose is not the true world. It is a surface world, a superficial world, a frozen world of appearances, beneath which an entirely different world surges as if a wild river that any moment might drown us."
♫♫♫ Bright Horses - Nick Cave ♫♫♫
January 29, 2024
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?
This is Question 7, and it comes from Anton Chekhov’s parody of a school test problem. I can honestly say it’s like nothing I’ve read before from Richard Flanagan, whose fiction I adore. It is, in turns, a memoir, an auto-fiction, an historical and/or philosophical treatise, a metaphorical tale. Did I love it? I can’t say that I did. What I can say is that I admire it enormously and wish that I loved it.
What, in the end, do questions mean? Does everything in life affect everything else? Richard Flanagan touches on a lot here: the unbridled affair between HG Wells and Rebecca West; the dropping of the atomic bomb by aircraft pilot Thomas Ferebee (“Bomb away!”), the same pilot who carpet-bombed Vietnam, destroying that country, too, decades later; the heinous Japanese Death Railway (where Flanagan’s father suffered as a POW); and Flanagan’s own near-death experience while navigating the powerful rapids of the Franklin River.
The dropping of the atomic bomb incinerated 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000 Innocent Japanese citizens. It also brought about the end of his father’s internment. What if the bomb hadn’t dropped? All those victims would have been alive, but Flanagan himself would not have lived, because his father would likely have perished. No father, no son.
Or what if Rebecca West had not begun an affair with HG Wells? Likely he would not have gone to Switzerland to write a book called The World Set Free, and without that book, Leo Szilard might never have imagined what a nuclear chain reaction could do. It’s like the ultimate butterfly effect: everything touches everything else.
Yes, the book is brilliant. But satisfying? Ay, there’s the rub.
This is Question 7, and it comes from Anton Chekhov’s parody of a school test problem. I can honestly say it’s like nothing I’ve read before from Richard Flanagan, whose fiction I adore. It is, in turns, a memoir, an auto-fiction, an historical and/or philosophical treatise, a metaphorical tale. Did I love it? I can’t say that I did. What I can say is that I admire it enormously and wish that I loved it.
What, in the end, do questions mean? Does everything in life affect everything else? Richard Flanagan touches on a lot here: the unbridled affair between HG Wells and Rebecca West; the dropping of the atomic bomb by aircraft pilot Thomas Ferebee (“Bomb away!”), the same pilot who carpet-bombed Vietnam, destroying that country, too, decades later; the heinous Japanese Death Railway (where Flanagan’s father suffered as a POW); and Flanagan’s own near-death experience while navigating the powerful rapids of the Franklin River.
The dropping of the atomic bomb incinerated 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000 Innocent Japanese citizens. It also brought about the end of his father’s internment. What if the bomb hadn’t dropped? All those victims would have been alive, but Flanagan himself would not have lived, because his father would likely have perished. No father, no son.
Or what if Rebecca West had not begun an affair with HG Wells? Likely he would not have gone to Switzerland to write a book called The World Set Free, and without that book, Leo Szilard might never have imagined what a nuclear chain reaction could do. It’s like the ultimate butterfly effect: everything touches everything else.
Yes, the book is brilliant. But satisfying? Ay, there’s the rub.
February 18, 2024
I have read all of Flanagan’s books. I am an admirer of his writing and I have heard him speak on several occasions. One of the most telling comments was his praise for public education when he spoke of the fact that the grandson of illiterate grandparents became a Booker prize winner after having access to public education.
Question 7 is a meandering mind map of Flanagan’s and reflections on his parents, his ancestors and Tasmania. The book opens with Flanagan visiting Japan in 2012. I can only assume that he was there to collect information for his Booker Prize winning novel, ‘The Road to the Deep North.’ Flanagan’s father had been a Japanese POW who had been in Changi, the Thai-Burma Railroad and then he had been transported to Japan to work as slave labourer in a Japanese coal mine. His father had told him that he would not have survived another winter in Japan, so the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945 saved his life. Flanagan reflects on this fact and realises that he would never have been born if the bomb had not been dropped. A visit to chaos theory and the butterfly effect. Later in the book he meets Japanese and Korean men who were prison guards during the war. He had mixed emotional responses.
The author ties in the writings of HG Wells and his relationship with Rebecca West and other scientists in an extrapolated and tenuous connection to the development of the atomic bomb.
On this narrative journey Flanagan dips into personal memoir, anecdotal and factual historical accounts.
Flanagan introduces the reader to an assortment of men involved in the development of atom theory, Einstein, Rutherford, Szilard.
Flanagan says he wrote this book as a love note to his parents. He gives an emotional account of the death of his mother. A Tasmanian women born into poverty, lead an austere life but had unmitigated love of her children and lived well into her nineties.
Tasmania is the setting of so many of his books and Question 7 continues this situation. During the reading we often visit the Tasmania of Flanagan’s childhood. The small settlement of Rosebery is where he spent his early childhood.
I appreciated his brief account of his time at Oxford and his encounter with English superiorism. I experienced similar in my time in the UK. The upper-, middle- and working-class English all think they have it over the colonials. It was a mild form of racism.
I have had an interest in the history of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I too had a relative working in the mines in Japan when the bomb was dropped. I have visited Hiroshima on several occasions. The enduring question of the justification of using atomic weapons has interested me. To answer it accurately you would need to take the mindset of the American and allied troupes in Europe. They had fought a brutal and sustained war against Nazi Germany. The officers knew that it would be difficult to get them to start again in the far east. The Pacific forces knew from their experiences on Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa that invading Japan could lead to the deaths of between 1.7 and 4 million American servicemen.
Some historians argue that it was the fear of the entry of Russia into the war that drove the Japanese to surrender rather than the two bombs.
Flanagan concludes with a detailed account of his near-death experience as a twenty-one-year-old on a kayaking trip down the Franklin. This horrendous experience led to his first novel Death of a River Guide.
The reader would appreciate this book more if they have read a few of his other books, especially those with a biographical bent. It took some while to get into the flow of this book, but it became a rewarding experience. There were times when I stopped and reflected not only on Flanagan’s life but on my own life experiences. He continues to impress as a great Australian author.
Question 7 is a meandering mind map of Flanagan’s and reflections on his parents, his ancestors and Tasmania. The book opens with Flanagan visiting Japan in 2012. I can only assume that he was there to collect information for his Booker Prize winning novel, ‘The Road to the Deep North.’ Flanagan’s father had been a Japanese POW who had been in Changi, the Thai-Burma Railroad and then he had been transported to Japan to work as slave labourer in a Japanese coal mine. His father had told him that he would not have survived another winter in Japan, so the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945 saved his life. Flanagan reflects on this fact and realises that he would never have been born if the bomb had not been dropped. A visit to chaos theory and the butterfly effect. Later in the book he meets Japanese and Korean men who were prison guards during the war. He had mixed emotional responses.
The author ties in the writings of HG Wells and his relationship with Rebecca West and other scientists in an extrapolated and tenuous connection to the development of the atomic bomb.
On this narrative journey Flanagan dips into personal memoir, anecdotal and factual historical accounts.
Flanagan introduces the reader to an assortment of men involved in the development of atom theory, Einstein, Rutherford, Szilard.
Flanagan says he wrote this book as a love note to his parents. He gives an emotional account of the death of his mother. A Tasmanian women born into poverty, lead an austere life but had unmitigated love of her children and lived well into her nineties.
Tasmania is the setting of so many of his books and Question 7 continues this situation. During the reading we often visit the Tasmania of Flanagan’s childhood. The small settlement of Rosebery is where he spent his early childhood.
I appreciated his brief account of his time at Oxford and his encounter with English superiorism. I experienced similar in my time in the UK. The upper-, middle- and working-class English all think they have it over the colonials. It was a mild form of racism.
I have had an interest in the history of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I too had a relative working in the mines in Japan when the bomb was dropped. I have visited Hiroshima on several occasions. The enduring question of the justification of using atomic weapons has interested me. To answer it accurately you would need to take the mindset of the American and allied troupes in Europe. They had fought a brutal and sustained war against Nazi Germany. The officers knew that it would be difficult to get them to start again in the far east. The Pacific forces knew from their experiences on Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa that invading Japan could lead to the deaths of between 1.7 and 4 million American servicemen.
Some historians argue that it was the fear of the entry of Russia into the war that drove the Japanese to surrender rather than the two bombs.
Flanagan concludes with a detailed account of his near-death experience as a twenty-one-year-old on a kayaking trip down the Franklin. This horrendous experience led to his first novel Death of a River Guide.
The reader would appreciate this book more if they have read a few of his other books, especially those with a biographical bent. It took some while to get into the flow of this book, but it became a rewarding experience. There were times when I stopped and reflected not only on Flanagan’s life but on my own life experiences. He continues to impress as a great Australian author.
March 23, 2025
Thank you for this Mr. Flanagan!
And thank you @ColinBaldwin for yet another compelling buddy read!
Keeping it short as per my usual style, I will leave you with this quote:
“Wear the mask every day you are in public and never let them see your face”
And thank you @ColinBaldwin for yet another compelling buddy read!
Keeping it short as per my usual style, I will leave you with this quote:
“Wear the mask every day you are in public and never let them see your face”
December 6, 2024
Can you plot-spoil a memoir? That's not Question #7, but it might as well be, could be. I'll try and be careful. In any event, the memoir parts of this book have been told before. You'd recognize them if you've read The Narrow Road to the Deep North and The Death of a River Guide. Even Gould, he of the Book of Fish, makes a cameo by reference.
Those memoir bits intersperse with some intriguing historical events, specifically Leo Szilard's efforts to create, and then dismantle, the atomic bomb, and the steamy adulterous affair between Rebecca West and H.G. Wells. Flanagan makes it happen, magically. The question becomes not who loves longer, a man or a woman, but whether the Bomb and all its destruction was worth it to save a father's life. And make this book possible. Flanagan writes that he will not, can not, answer the question . . .
. . . Yet words exist to grasp the world and if every day afresh the world eludes them, every tomorrow they are condemned to begin their crazy dance again: words to anchor, the world to fly; words to say it is so, the world to say it is not. And so they tango eternally, words and the world, writers no more than dancing shoes sliding between the dancer and the dance floor.
And this, too . . .
My father had . . . a sense of the magic of words that never left him, an awareness that those twenty-six abstract symbols could liberate if you understood them and oppress if you didn't. He told me the written word was the first beautiful thing he ever knew, a line I stole and used elsewhere. What is a writer but a robber and what is the history of literature but a milky way of theft?
This beautiful thing . . .
Tears in the old do not roll, they catch and stall in the lines and furrows of the face, spot-glossing the price paid for time.
Those memoir bits intersperse with some intriguing historical events, specifically Leo Szilard's efforts to create, and then dismantle, the atomic bomb, and the steamy adulterous affair between Rebecca West and H.G. Wells. Flanagan makes it happen, magically. The question becomes not who loves longer, a man or a woman, but whether the Bomb and all its destruction was worth it to save a father's life. And make this book possible. Flanagan writes that he will not, can not, answer the question . . .
. . . Yet words exist to grasp the world and if every day afresh the world eludes them, every tomorrow they are condemned to begin their crazy dance again: words to anchor, the world to fly; words to say it is so, the world to say it is not. And so they tango eternally, words and the world, writers no more than dancing shoes sliding between the dancer and the dance floor.
And this, too . . .
My father had . . . a sense of the magic of words that never left him, an awareness that those twenty-six abstract symbols could liberate if you understood them and oppress if you didn't. He told me the written word was the first beautiful thing he ever knew, a line I stole and used elsewhere. What is a writer but a robber and what is the history of literature but a milky way of theft?
This beautiful thing . . .
Tears in the old do not roll, they catch and stall in the lines and furrows of the face, spot-glossing the price paid for time.
February 17, 2024
Beautifully crafted and elegantly written, Flanagan explores the connectedness of things and events that have impacted on his father’s (and his own) life.
Using a nuclear fission metaphor he delves into science, physics, the destruction of Tasmanian forests and wildlife, the nature of genocide and his own failings.
It’s a fascinating, insightful book that shows the mind of an insightful, honest and compassionate man.
Using a nuclear fission metaphor he delves into science, physics, the destruction of Tasmanian forests and wildlife, the nature of genocide and his own failings.
It’s a fascinating, insightful book that shows the mind of an insightful, honest and compassionate man.
September 22, 2025
So much to unpack. The authors experience with death was gut wrenching. It makes him look at life in a different way, for a while. He has an intense way of describing and explaining things in a way that helps you to “feel” his experience.
The mental dilemma of what is okay to kill people with, in war was a new one for me. I’d never thought of that. A million civilians with bombs, guns, or an atomic bomb. There should never be war but which way is a more humane death? Morally acceptable death? No one can answer.
His deep thought about life, love, war, genocide ( all of which he has close knowledge) are so interestingly expressed. I had a hard time grasping his thoughts at times but after reading and thinking about it again. It clicked. He has a very unique life experience and a beautiful way of using words to share it with us.
The mental dilemma of what is okay to kill people with, in war was a new one for me. I’d never thought of that. A million civilians with bombs, guns, or an atomic bomb. There should never be war but which way is a more humane death? Morally acceptable death? No one can answer.
His deep thought about life, love, war, genocide ( all of which he has close knowledge) are so interestingly expressed. I had a hard time grasping his thoughts at times but after reading and thinking about it again. It clicked. He has a very unique life experience and a beautiful way of using words to share it with us.
March 26, 2025
Did 2 quite important things for me. Those being:
1. re-evocation of that particular and overwhelming feeling that maybe can only be found in Tasmania or in work about its essence? Those word-pictures of the cool and damp and dense and green and brown and lifeless but so lively aeons of forests untrampled and left to run wild across the land just did so much for me, making me ache for that specific place where i passed through, not saying much, not having much to say, instead just feeling that liminal sense of flowing movement. A snapshot i recall fondly.
2. provided clarity in a month that's felt confused at best. Its looseness and deeply textural impressions allowed some much needed re-framing every time i picked it up. One of the better slow reads I've had - it, in some ways, asked more of me in a time where i was struggling to give to myself, and at last, just now, perhaps has pulled me free.
Highly recommended.
1. re-evocation of that particular and overwhelming feeling that maybe can only be found in Tasmania or in work about its essence? Those word-pictures of the cool and damp and dense and green and brown and lifeless but so lively aeons of forests untrampled and left to run wild across the land just did so much for me, making me ache for that specific place where i passed through, not saying much, not having much to say, instead just feeling that liminal sense of flowing movement. A snapshot i recall fondly.
2. provided clarity in a month that's felt confused at best. Its looseness and deeply textural impressions allowed some much needed re-framing every time i picked it up. One of the better slow reads I've had - it, in some ways, asked more of me in a time where i was struggling to give to myself, and at last, just now, perhaps has pulled me free.
Highly recommended.
March 11, 2025
Ten years ago I read Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North. His recent book Question 7 won the Baillie Gifford Prize, making him the only winner of Britain’s two top literary awards for both fiction and nonfiction. I’m glad that I previously read The Narrow Road because Flanagan starts Question 7 with a visit to Japan where, near the end of the war, his father was a prisoner and slave laborer in an undersea mine.
The book is structured into groups of very short chapters, giving it a staccato feel… or maybe a nuclear chain reaction. So, in that spirit…
Question 7 - Who loves more? men or women?
Literature is focused on asking questions, rather than answering them.
Connecting the dots: H. G. Wells’s book - Leo Szilard - Einstein - the Manhattan Project - Flanagan’s father - Richard Flanagan
A thought provoking look at how ideas originate.
Flanagan looks back on growing up in Tasmania. His family, nature and history. I found Part Seven on his return to Roseberry, and his remembrances of his mother and his early deafness particularly touching.
He closes with a life defining moment, that will inspire an early book of his.
I’m very glad I read this moving “memoir”. It also confirmed a desire to try Flanagan’s less popular, but critically praised, Gould’s Book of Fish.
The book is structured into groups of very short chapters, giving it a staccato feel… or maybe a nuclear chain reaction. So, in that spirit…
Question 7 - Who loves more? men or women?
Literature is focused on asking questions, rather than answering them.
Connecting the dots: H. G. Wells’s book - Leo Szilard - Einstein - the Manhattan Project - Flanagan’s father - Richard Flanagan
A thought provoking look at how ideas originate.
Flanagan looks back on growing up in Tasmania. His family, nature and history. I found Part Seven on his return to Roseberry, and his remembrances of his mother and his early deafness particularly touching.
He closes with a life defining moment, that will inspire an early book of his.
I’m very glad I read this moving “memoir”. It also confirmed a desire to try Flanagan’s less popular, but critically praised, Gould’s Book of Fish.
December 8, 2024
Richard Flanagan’s memoir blends personal recollections with biography, history, science, literature, and a critique of colonialism in a series of quasi-essays. It also pays homage to his family history and his homeland (Tasmania). The content includes such diverse topics as HG Wells’s relationship with Rebecca West, a discussion of atomic power and the use of it as a destructive weapon in WWII, his father’s experience in a Japanese prisoner of war, Flanagan’s personal history of a near-drowning, and the British establishment of the penal colony is Australia (and its consequences).
These themes, on the surface, seem like a hodgepodge, but the combination, taken as a whole, comes across as deeply insightful. His observations about his interviews with some of the Japanese former camp-guards are fascinating. I have read other books by Richard Flanagan, and some of the material has been covered in his other works, but this book brings it all together as a meditation about humankind’s impact on the world. I found it to be a powerful, enjoyable, and interesting reading experience.
These themes, on the surface, seem like a hodgepodge, but the combination, taken as a whole, comes across as deeply insightful. His observations about his interviews with some of the Japanese former camp-guards are fascinating. I have read other books by Richard Flanagan, and some of the material has been covered in his other works, but this book brings it all together as a meditation about humankind’s impact on the world. I found it to be a powerful, enjoyable, and interesting reading experience.
December 21, 2023
My book of the year and the first time I’ve been wondering if a book can be given six stars. To paraphrase another reviewer, an artist at the height of his powers. Having read all of Flanagan’s previous books and much of his other work, really enjoyed seeing parts of these from other perspectives, including the multiple timelines. I rarely re-read these days but will be keeping this one to come back to again.
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