Question 7

Memory, death and reflection with Richard Flanagan (and Sebastian Junger)

Tasmania was a place of social counterfeits and off-key echoes, where “the convict-class is regarded just as the negroes must be in South Carolina,” and ex-convict shepherds “whistled nigger melodies in the balmy air.”

— Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore

Spoilers?

Question 7 is a self-styled love letter to Richard Flanagan’s parents and to his lonely island home, Tasmania. Flanagan dips his hands into his memory and pours it out for us in an intense if occasionally maudlin tempest. There is no memory without shame, he writes, remembering writing about love more than loving. His memory conjures his father, who came back from the horrors of Japanese slave camps. There he peers into the 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000 Japanese killed at Hiroshima who are well remembered, and the even more killed in the fire bombings of Tokyo who are less remembered, and the spasms of brutality across Europe and Cambodia and Laos, where countless forgotten dead lie. What do these numbers even mean, Flanagan begs. What is the calculus that would weigh the death of a daughter by Allied bombing against the death of countless civilians across the ocean? Flanagan grapples with who we remember and why. Who dies and who lives. Meditates on the contingencies that led to his birth on his beloved island, amidst the ghosts of an extinguished people. The infinite threads of causality that bind history. The strange co-dependent, co-corrupting relationship between strong and weak, flogger and flogged, extinguisher and extinguished. His predecessors shimmer in and out of view: from crawlers (convicts) to the merely poor, from Catholic disciplinarians to men and women trying to make their way through the world. In a desperate crescendo he reveals another secret in the endless unravelling of the threads that bind his life: possibly, some indigenous ancestry. He is deaf for a time. Mistaken for a simpleton, Flanagan peers beneath the mossy veneer of the Tasmanian wilderness to gaze at Creation. He ends his story staring into near-death at the maw of his beloved island.

Flanagan’s story is extremely local: not only very Australian, but very Tasmanian. I don’t have the geographical knowledge or the nomenclature, but it’s probably even more local than that: a specific strand of Vandemonian folkways. The story of his family and its distant connections to Japanese dead and American bombers and to H.G Wells. This story brims with the nuances of local class dynamics. His is a world of small kitchens, tired lounges, blighted backyards. He is dismissed by a shopkeeper in Launceston who tells him: We’re not a convict town like Hobart. We’re Victorian. His mother thwacks him after some boyish exuberance: Never show off. He doesn’t understand, weathering the tempests of his mother’s moods like unpredictable spasms in the universe. But he grows to appreciate the shape of her pain and her sacrifice. He is humiliated and enraged by his time at Oxford, disillusioned with the vulgarity and mediocrity he finds at the heart of empire. Money is anathema to his poor working class parents. Ambition is a viper. Money is like shit: pile it up and it stinks; spread it around and things grow. He is contemptuous of industry, spitting out words like investors and boardroom and is apocalyptic in his meditation on the destruction being visited on the Tasmanian wilderness, and the destruction that a changing climate — induced by industry — will have on the world.

Industry is a dirty word for Flanagan, a billowing Dickensian monstrosity gorging on his ancient wilderness to raise lifeless edifices to man’s hubris. He is a writer, a Tasmanian, a (former?) working class Catholic: all things distant from and skeptical of bosses and of industry. This is understandable, but it’s in these dismissive moments that he is shallowest and least compelling. There is no room in Flanagan’s world for the miracle of technology, the wonders of the Age of Sail, the singular wealth created by modernity around the world. All he sees are exploitative bosses, murderous sailors and sealers and whalers, vicious Englishmen and Japanese and Germans, and the apotheosis of technological destruction: the atom bomb. For him to accept the idea of a civilising part of the British Empire would be to accept massacred Tasmanian natives and the scarred emaciated convict-slave backs of its gulag archipelago down under.

Flanagan is a romantic. A soaring romantic, who knows no love without suffering. In Question 7 as in The Narrow Road to the Deep North he quivers over the bends of a woman’s back, or combusts in frenzied desire or painful retreat. One can’t help but wonder where this comes from, who this isolated softly-spoken writer loved and who hurt him.

Flanagan has few answers in this memoir of swirling fragments. We experience it as both a torrent of memory and revelation as well as an intense meditation on the unanswerable question of why. He confronts one of the evil Japanese guards, now aged, that made his father’s life hell. A Korean, it turns out. Flanagan asks the man to slap him, hard in the way they disciplined the prisoners. In that moment an earthquake hits Tokyo and the ground itself shakes. The old man holds on fearfully. In that moment, Flanagan sees no evil in that room. Just a scared old man. The entire world trembles as Flanagan remembers. His reality is more magic than real. Certainly, his memory.

This is the way of pain. How does one stare into the abyss? As a teenager I visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. At the end I entered a room where visitors could access a database. I typed in my family’s name, which is uncommon. I was looking for the names of my grandfather’s eleven year old brother and his parents who had been shot by the Germans, buried somewhere in a mass grave by the Einsatzgruppen. Dozens of names appeared and I wept. I had peered too closely. These memories and others came to me as I read Question 7. Peering into the abyss, into the incomprehensible paths that led to this moment. How else to write a story of pain, itself encased in others’ pain like an endless matryoshka doll, a world balancing on the backs of haggard men all the way down.

Question 7 is a natural companion to Sebastian Junger’s new memoir In My Time of Dying. There too Junger stares into his near-deaths. Yet where Flanagan, who is blessed with one more daughter than Junger, sees environmental apocalypse, Junger sees the potential for life after death. Junger delves into the deranging world of known physics, which wraps around his family in personal ways too. His beautiful great-aunt was impregnated as a Austrian teenager by a forty one year old Erwin Schrödinger (of the cat/s), well on his way to being awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. Junger’s friends and family are killed or kill themselves — and at each juncture, he too asks why, and why not him. And he searches the known universe for answers that elude him. His story is also a love letter to his parents and their devoted, exasperated love. His dead father appears to him in his moment of near-death and Junger furtively explores the unanswerable and shares his cautious, inconclusive findings.¹ Certainly, Junger appreciates the miracle of technology. His is the first generation to survive an abdominal hemorrhage, a direct result of the doctors and inventors who created the methods and tools to save him.²

I listened to Junger’s gravel voice tell his tale and I listened to Flanagan tell his. Flanagan’s melancholy Aussie accent, the occasional rasp of pages turning. Memoirs are best listened to by the author. The author’s tale from the author’s lips. Sometimes I wondered whether it would not have been better to read Question 7 like I read The Narrow Road to the Deep North, whether some of Flanagan’s literary flourishes would not be better enjoyed by the recesses of a reading mind. Whether they sound more stilted on the lips of a softly spoken writer. But it works, and we’re lucky to have these men ponder and share with us the cosmic improbabilities of their lives and this moment and what meaning they can grasp.

1. Junger’s father is some sort of physics genius, and we instantly love him:

With bright blue eyes and a handsome Mediterranean face, he had the appearance of someone who would be completely at ease in the human world. But he often entered it like a scuba diver with forty five minutes of air and a weight belt to keep himself down. That was particularly true around my mother’s friends who were mostly artists and yogis and macrobiotics. He had scripts for common conversations and when he ran out of those, he just closed his eyes and started talking about the ancient Greeks.

2. Did you know the first catheterization of the heart was performed on himself by Werner Forssmann in 1929? Twenty four at the time, it was thought that the heart was too fragile for the procedure, and he was not allowed to test his theory on patients.