Question 7 by Richard Flanagan BLOG TOUR #Question7 @vintagebooks @ChattoBooks @RandomTTours #BookReview

 

This is a book about the choices we make and the chain reaction that follows . . .

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 daisy chain of events reaches fission when a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river, not knowing if he is to live or to die.

Flanagan has created a love song to his island home and his parents and the terrible past that delivered him to that place.

Through a hypnotic melding of dream, history, science, and memory, Question 7 shows how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan was published on 30 May 2024 by Chatto and Windus / Vintage Books. My thanks to the publisher who sent my copy for review as part of this #RandomThingsTours Blog Tour

I have not read anything by Richard Flanagan before and I have certainly never read anything remotely like Question 7 before either. It is an astonishing piece of writing, I devoured it over a couple of evenings. 

It is part memoir, part historical fiction and a lot of reflection. The author describes it as a love letter to his parents and it certainly that, and so much more.  My copy is full of folded corners, places that I kept going back to, to re-read, or read out loud. Pondering and wondering as I did. 

Question 7 was initially asked by Chekhov in 'Questions Posed by A Mad Mathematician' (no, I've not read Chekhov either), and the actual question is; 'Who loves longer, a man or a woman?'.  Who knows? However Flanagan's portrayal of his parents and family speak volumes and one could try to answer the question using the author's family as your subjects. 

Whilst there is such a lot incorporated into this story, the main theme, for me as a reader is 'Time does not heal, it leaves scars' .... oh, so very true.  We are never healed after a loss, but we will always bear the scars of that loss. Anyone who has lost anyone, or experienced something life altering will testify to that, and Flanagan certainly bears the scars of his childhood, his parent's memories and his own very near brush with death. 

I'm a little afraid about writing this review as the author clearly states that there are good readers and there are bad. I hope that I am a good reader, maybe I got something different from this book, I will never know! 

I loved the authors recollections of his childhood in Tasmania, the fifth son of six children. This is not just a memoir about his life and family though. Running throughout the novel, we are shown how his father's survival after being a slave labourer in a Japanese war camp could quite possibly be attributed to H G Wells. We learn how Wells and journalist Rebecca West entered into an affair, and how Wells then moved abroad. It was then that he wrote 'The World Set Free', featuring a bomb to end all wars. A very similar bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, killing tens of thousands of people, yet that bomb was the reason that Flanagan's father survived. 

Question 7 raises so many questions of its own. It is beautifully written, there's tenderness and compassion, there's hurt and anger. It is contemplative and serious, and totally different to my usual reads. Enjoyed is a strange word to describe how I feel about this one, it made me think, it made me stop reading at times and sit and think. It is multi layered, very clever and really so very clever. 

Richard Flanagan has been described by the Washington Post as ‘one of our greatest
living novelists’ and as ‘among the most versatile writers in the English language’ by the New York Review of Books. He won the Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North and the Commonwealth Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish.

A major television series of The Narrow Road to the Deep North is now in production, directed by celebrated film director Justin Kurzel (The True History of the Kelly Gang, Macbeth, Nitram), and starring Jacob Elordi (Euphoria, Saltburn, Priscilla) and Ciarán Hinds (Belfast, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy).