Who loves longer?
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan (Knopf, 2024)
Reviewed by Grace Mackey
Why do writers write? Anton Chekhov, the Russian playwright and short story author, considered this at length. Writers should probe, he concluded. They should pose questions without answering them. They should pose significant questions— seven key questions in particular— without answering them: What is man? What is his purpose? What is love? What is work? What is happiness or suffering? What is God or faith or belief? What is death? These are Chekhov’s questions, but Richard Flanagan makes one his own in his new book.
Early in Question 7, Richard Flanagan paraphrases one of Chekhov’s earliest stories, “a parody of arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren,” where he constructs the following problem: “Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?” (24). It’s abstract, even incoherent, but it resonates with Flanagan. It is precisely what he is asking in his book.
Hobart Town Mercury’s quote about Moby Dick sits inside the cover of Question 7: “The author has not given his effort here the benefit of knowing whether it is history, autobiography, gazetteer, tragedy, romance, almanac, melodrama, or fantasy. It may be myriad, it may not. The question is posed, but where is the answer?” In his ten chapters, Flanagan weaves together rich narratives in the form of autobiography, fiction (specifically historical fiction and autofiction), history, and philosophy all in one. Flanagan spends the book unraveling a tapestry, trying to decipher meaning in history and memory. Flanagan examines World War II history; Hiroshima; his home, brutally colonized Tasmania; his parents’ kitchen; the white water rapids where he died and came back to life. He does not offer coherence because he struggles to find any himself. Instead, he encounters fragmented tragedies, with acts of love sprinkled throughout. As Flanagan puts it, “Virtue and morality are stripped away to reveal cruelty and wickedness while cruelty and wickedness, in turn, are stripped away to reveal kindness and goodness” (25).
Question 7 may fall into multiple genres, but it is first and foremost Flanagan’s memoir. As he explores his family history, he first finds himself in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan, walking the grounds of what was once Ohama Camp, the slave labor camp where his father was imprisoned during World War II. While examining his father’s brutal past, he also interrogates world history— specifically the history of mass violence, beginning with Hiroshima. To Flanagan, both personal and monumental historical events beg Chekhov’s question: Who loves longer? Flanagan inspects catastrophic levels of death and grief in world history and asks: what lasts? His response is: very little.
Flanagan does not merely describe history. He grieves it. He attempts to relive it. Flanagan describes his father at length: a veteran who uses few words, but also influences the author’s perspective on the war and the world more than anyone else. Flanagan writes, “He didn’t seek me out to explain any of it. It was left to me to slowly piece together the knowledge that a war comic was not war, nor yet life; that there was a real world that had to be addressed with the utmost respect and seriousness” (64). As a slave laborer, Flanagan’s father stood a short 80 miles away from Hiroshima when Thomas Ferebee dropped the atomic bomb. Yet Flanagan finds his father’s quiet, consistent love and enjoyment of his family, his home, and the local news to be an equally, if not more notable detail about him.
During Flanagan’s visit to Japan, many of the locals live in either denial or ignorance of the former labor camp, including Muto, a Japanese guard that was exceptionally cruel toward the prisoners. Flanagan is startled by how the Japanese citizens neglect the topic. He spends the rest of the book swallowing some of the most repulsive pills of memory. As he faces catastrophic levels of death and violence, he wrestles with despair. He writes, “Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings— why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life in the hope that behind it we will find the truth of why. But there is no truth. There is only why. And when we look closer we see that behind that why is just another tapestry. And behind it another, and another, until we arrive at oblivion” (4). Flanagan is a true postmodernist. He seems tired of grand narratives. There are moments of poignant, flowing narrative, but they abruptly end with violence. “Bomb away!” declares Thomas Ferebee, and life is abruptly and procedurally, brought to an end (22).
Both chance and choice shape Flanagan’s unique historical record. His initial encounters in Japan lead Flanagan back to a 1913 London bar where H.G. Wells and Rebecca West once sat. There, they began their intense, brief, and somewhat dangerous romance. Flanagan zooms in on these ambitious, sharp, and self-indulgent people because they are a part of a fascinating domino effect. In 1914, Wells published The World Set Free, with West to thank for the intellectual development that led to this work. In 1932, Leo Szilard would pick up the novel, read and fall in love with it, and devise nuclear fission under its influence. From this comes the atomic bomb, and from this comes 140,000 deaths in Hiroshima.
In Question 7, literature and science intertwine. They do not exist on separate planes but instead perform a waltz across the same one. Fiction influences science and science influences fiction. H.G. Wells’ fiction inspired Szilard, who then applied his creativity to the natural world. Twelve years later, Szilard was begging others to limit his creation with morality and sense. When presenting Szilard’s story, Flanagan writes, “The paradox of Leo Szilard is that as his life progresses, the brilliant man with an almost mystical ability to see the future nevertheless seems to come under the spell of a mediocre novel so completely that at first the book appears to predict his life only then to mock it” (136). The relationship between science and literature is ongoing. The atomic bomb has come to inspire a number of popular fiction novels, from Lord of the Flies by William Golding to Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. It is a cycle Flanagan purposefully notes as he fills Question 7 with both fiction and fact.
Later in the book, Flanagan revisits Tasmania's colonization, with its bloodshed, injustice, and uprooting. When describing the colonization he writes, “The intricate, myriad, miraculous relationships, the sum of which is Tasmanian rainforest, a precise confusion of tree, fern, moss, fungi…that might better be described as an unknown civilisation, will, along with these words, become no more than the lost jetsam of time” (148). Flanagan confronts an atrocity relatively neglected in Australian public culture: the British genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Similar to Ohama Camp, Flanagan is motivated to purposefully spend time there, describing it in detail in order to reject the threat of erasure.
At the end of the book, Flanagan takes a final trip down memory lane, providing context for his perception of time throughout the rest of the book. He revisits what he frames as his death. Others might consider it a near-death experience, but he considers it death and resurrection. He describes his death from an aerial view, watching himself drown in a kayak surrounded by white water rapids. He watches outside of himself and outside of time. This mirrors the way he sits outside time throughout the book as well. Every traumatic event seems perpetual, including this one.
Flanagan writes for those asking the contemplative, strenuous questions related to atrocities like World War II or colonialism, and for people who are comfortable with abstraction and uncertainty. It would be false to say he offers no hope. Flanagan gives the reader a sense that there is meaning in small acts of consistent, lasting love, even when they are contrasted with catastrophic acts of evil. Flanagan’s work suggests Chekhov’s question, “Who loves longer?” should be readers’ primary question.
The book is striking and confrontational, but profoundly unsatisfying. Flanagan unravels a complex, emotional tapestry before the reader, and, to his credit, he is incredibly vulnerable. But for all of the exhaustive details of a wide range of moments, including his own, he provides no conclusions. He asks difficult and confusing questions, but after all of his fragmented history and blips of tragedy that beg for a response, he leaves them as questions, just as Chekhov encouraged. If Flanagan gets close to offering a person in response to the question, “Who loves longer?” it is his father.
Grace Mackey is an Editorial Assistant for Orange Blossom Ordinary. She graduated from Palm Beach Atlantic University with a B.A. in English with a minor in journalism. She has published creative writing in Palm Beach Atlantic's Living Waters Review and Sigma Tau Delta's Rectangle, and was an Editor and writer for The Beacon Today.
