Question 7

"There’s a connection with The Narrow Road to the Deep North because that book was also concerned with his father’s experience of being a slave laborer in the Second World War: he was an Australian captured by the Japanese. Question 7 also picks up on the nuclear theme, because Hiroshima is a key part of it. His father was unlikely to survive another winter. He was weak, he was exhausted, he was starving. It was also possible that the closing months of the war would have seen the slaughter of American and Australian prisoners at Japanese hands. His father was saved by the first nuclear bomb used by the United States on Japan, which helped to bring the war to an end. That meant he survived, and Richard Flanagan was born. In a curious way, Richard Flanagan owes his existence to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the world’s first nuclear attack on Hiroshima. That doesn’t make the use of nuclear weapons anything that can be defended, but the whole book is a meditation on the conundrum of life, of moral choices, on the connection between apparently unrelated things, on memory, on understanding. A lot of it is about his father and what he became after the war, and about his mother. It’s also about Tasmania and genocide in Tasmania by settlers. It’s about the shame of being descended from a convict family in Australia. It’s about HG Wells and Rebecca West. It’s about the connection that he traces between HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds and an exiled Hungarian nuclear physicist who understood the idea of chain reaction. It came to him in a flash of insight and it led him to understand that splitting the atom would inevitably lead to a bomb. Question 7 is the most extraordinary narrative which pulls together personal experience, the experience of his father, and revisiting sites that his father saw, meeting people—including Japanese former prison guards, people who were on the other side of his father’s experience—and then linking that through to both the cultural and the scientific history of the development and then the use of the bomb. It is a memoir but of expanded consciousness. Again, you can’t really put it down. It’s beautifully written. It’s very original in the way it uses reflection and fact and personal stories. Yes, that’s true. And what holds this part memoir, part science, part history together is the personal thread. The book begins and ends with a kayaking accident the author, Richard Flanagan, has in a river in Tasmania. He is rescued, but only just. He describes this moment when he is floating above the river, looking down at himself. Is that death? In the middle there is this extraordinary imaginative thread which, as I said, links his father’s experience, his own existence, and the wider history of the era, and does it beautifully."