In his unusual, unpredictable and slippery memoir, “Question 7,” the Australian writer Richard Flanagan is quick to call the whole project into doubt: Memories aren’t facts but stories, he contends, our lives an “ongoing invention.” Yet it was a fact-finding trip that yielded the book. Flanagan traveled to Japan to visit the camp where his father, a captured soldier, had been a slave laborer in the final days of World War II.
That journey fed into Flanagan’s novel, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” which won the Booker Prize in 2014. But it also planted a thought: If the atomic bomb had never been dropped on Hiroshima, and the U.S. invasion of Japan had gone ahead as planned several months later, Flanagan’s father, already near death, would have perished, and Flanagan would never have been born. Even more than most baby boomers, he is a child of the atomic age.
This is the realization that results in the book’s epic frame of reference, a chain reaction running from genocide in Flanagan’s native Tasmania to the love affairs of H.G. Wells, from a physicist bedeviled by the question of nuclear fission to the unprecedented destruction of Hiroshima, and from a hellish mine extending beneath Japan’s Inland Sea to the near-death experience of a young river guide trapped in a shattered kayak.
The title is a reference to an obscure short story by Chekhov, but the book’s presiding spirit is W.G. Sebald, whose memoir-like novels also move between the individual life and the deep waters of history — particularly the poisoned legacy of World War II. Flanagan acknowledges the debt in his book’s opening line: “In the winter of 2012, against my better judgment and for reasons that were not entirely to do with writing — much as I said they were — and which even now are not clear to me, I visited the site of Ohama Camp, Japan, where my father had once been interned.” It echoes that of Sebald’s “Austerlitz”: “In the second half of the 1960s I traveled repeatedly from England to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear to me, staying sometimes for just one or two days, sometimes for several weeks.”
What Flanagan achieves so well is locating what is intimately human within his grand sweep, whether that be a couple making love in a Swiss forest atop a newspaper, to protect themselves from pine needles, or the portraits of his parents and his maternal grandmother. The attention he pays these people is tender without ever sacrificing the sharpness of his gaze.
Occasionally, when he takes a moment to grouse about the groupthink of the literary scene, or the dogmas of creative writing M.F.A.s, the intensity level drops. This is a book of big swings, not minor complaints. It might even be guilty at times of grandiosity, given how it draws a line backward from Flanagan’s birth through some of the most consequential events and scientific discoveries of the 20th century, but the writing exerts an irresistible power and carries us with it.
Autobiography and memoir often, perhaps always, have a complicated relationship with the truth. There are times in “Question 7” when Flanagan says he could check a particular fact, but doing so would be antithetical to his purpose. Strip all else away and his book is “an account of memory, not fact, and facts are not how we know ourselves, while memory — its tricks, its evasions, its silences, its inventions, its inevitable questions — is who we become.”
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