Question 7 by Richard Flanagan
As I talked about in Thinking about coconuts, my youngest son asks a lot of questions. Many of them are good questions, sometimes very good. But sometimes he will ask a question-that-doesn’t-need-an-answer. An invalid question. An invalid question is one that contains a logical error and/or an incorrect premise. An example of a question that doesn’t need an answer is “What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?” — the question does not need to be answered because the question requires a universe in which two such things could exist, and two such things could not exist in the same universe. One of my current interests is The Book of Genesis, the interpretation of which has caused Christian theologians two thousand years of bother trying to answer the question of the problem of evil. The question doesn’t need to be answered because evil wouldn’t exist if the Christian god was omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect, so the question contains an incorrect premise and is invalid.
The question 7 in the book Question 7 by Richard Flanagan is a question-that-doesn’t-need-an-answer. It’s not even possible to attempt an answer, it is just nonsensical. I think Flanagan’s point is that life is a nonsensical question, one that perhaps needs no answer, but at the same time we must spend our lives trying to answer it.
On the surface this book is just a series of essays that Flanagan has written over the years, modified and stitched together into a single book. But it is so much more than that, as Flanagan has struggled his life to answer that nonsensical question. The book joins together events in his life and those of his family with major global events that affected their lives, such as the bombing of Hiroshima, linking fascinating historical stories that appear to make up a chain of events shaping their lives. It is brilliantly written. One of the themes is how our memories shape our understanding of our lives, but our memories are selective and imperfect. Flanagan drops some hints that some of his own memories in the book might be somewhat modified for the sake of the book, but in my reading that is kind of his point — our history is how we interpret it, and we have some choice in that. He tells a story of his father suddenly unburdening himself of a lifelong hatred towards a sadistic camp guard upon learning that the guard himself had selectively forgotten about what happened in the camp.
I like this kind of book — a book which is non-fiction, but also tells a gripping story and tackles major themes. I love to learn new things, and in this book I learnt about H.G. Wells, and it has made me want to study Wells and find out more and his relationship with Rebecca West — something I’ve never come across before. I have added The Young H.G. Wells by Claire Tomalin to my to-read list.
Highly recommended.