Flanagan approaches this extraordinary mix of memoir and history with honesty and integrity, admitting to not understanding life – his own, or that of his father or mother. Question 7 is an exploration and celebration of those lives, as well as of his beloved Tasmania.

The book begins in Japan, with Flanagan visiting the site of his father’s internment during World War II. His father was forced to work on both the Death Railway and the coal mine outside Sanyo-Onoda City. Time exposes life’s absurdities: a love hotel operates there now. He meets guards from the old POW camp. What follows illustrates his strength of character: rather than pretending emotions that would suit the circumstances, he admits that he doesn’t know what to feel.

Within the narrative is a historical reconstruction of the affair between the journalist Rebecca West and H G Wells. This seems unrelated, but Wells, in the otherwise dismal book, The World Set Free, presages the atomic bomb. Flanagan then follows the bomb’s development. The subsequent deaths in Hiroshima end the war, saving his father’s life, and culminates with the writer’s own existence. He can’t balance that equation.

Neither is he closer to understanding his father. Growing up, Flanagan thought this silent man was both ‘there and not there’, at once both passive and implacably stubborn. His mother was always busy. She ran the household, managed six kids and cared for her demanding mother.

Flanagan writes of Tasmanian convict and Aboriginal pasts where the view from outsiders has always been a lie. H G Wells based The War of the Worlds on those lies. Tasmania’s rivers have been his blessing and curse. Death of a River Guide began his literary career … but he also ‘drowned’ in the Franklin, aged 21. He hasn’t fully come to terms with it. He often ends a passage with, ‘That’s life’. In this narrative, life is inextricably associated with death.

The odd title comes from an Anton Chekhov story, ‘Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician’, where each question is illogical. Flanagan knows that life itself doesn’t make sense. He writes – beautifully and masterfully – to try to unravel its riddles.

Reviewed by Bob Moore

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Flanagan‘s novels have received numerous honours and are published in forty-two countries.

He won the Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North and the Commonwealth Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish.

The 1998 film of The Sound of One Hand Clapping, written and directed by Flanagan, was nominated for the Golden Bear at that year’s Berlin Film Festival.

He worked with Baz Luhrmann as a writer on the 2008 film Australia.

A rapid on the Franklin River is named after him.