Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan is a mesmerising compilation of fiction, memoir, and his deliberations on various subjects from the unique flavours of Australian classism to colonialism and the invention of the atomic bomb. Somehow, Flanagan manages to wrangle all of it together in a way that is simultaneously accessible yet fresh and original. Mainly, this is achieved by breaking the text down into bite-sized chunks that avoid the trap of waxing lyrical on the serendipitous universe. Besides this, Flanagan never lingers too long on a single area – memoir or otherwise – to allow his readers to get bored.  

He also doesn’t waste any words. Each line is relevant to the broader subject at hand, and more often than not, everything ties in with everything else, giving each section more than one layer of meaning.  

Question 7 is mostly about the improbability of life – how everything in the past had to line up perfectly for you to even exist today. For this reason, Flanagan talks often of his parents and it is clear that he sees their story as integral to his own. His father, for instance, was a Japanese POW who would have certainly died in a labour camp had two atomic bombs not been dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war. The atomic bombs, Flanagan also argues, would not have existed had the author H.G. Wells not written them into existence through one of his novels, inspiring physicist Leo Szilard towards the reality of atomic weaponry. H.G. Wells in turn, was inspired to write his tales of alien invasions after learning of the plight of the Indigenous Peoples from Flanagan’s island home of Tasmania. In this sense, Flanagan highlights the weighty yet entirely haphazard entanglements of the present moment 

I would recommend Question 7 to anyone who wants to read a different kind of memoir – one that isn’t linear or temporally-grounded. But instead experiments with structure and form, above all striving towards honesty, vulnerability, and candour at every twist and turn.  


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