Question 7

Richard Flanagan

This (brilliant) book defies categorization, but as we live in a word of labels, let’s try: a memoir, with fictional literary bits, and a little philosophy. Among other things, it explores how the thoughts of strangers ripple through our lives in profound and unexpected ways.

The title — and this is not going to make it sound any less like homework — is from Anton Chekhov. Very early in his career, Chekhov was broke and writing for money. He wrote a spoof of a hated Russian school math textbook, and question number seven in his parody goes like this:

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?

That non-sequitur — a question about love dropped into a math problem — is where this whole book sits. When we’re talking about anything, love is right there. Messy human relations are always the non-sequitur in everything we do. Sure, dark matter may exist, but is you is or is you ain’t my baby?

What Flanagan does with this is straight-up magic. He builds a chain of cause and effect that runs the length of the twentieth century, bouncing from feelings to science and back again.

Around 1914, the novelist H. G. Wells — terrified, in part, by an affair he was having with a much younger writer named Rebecca West — writes a novel called The World Set Free. In that book, he imagines atomic chain reactions destroying cities. Twenty years later, a Hungarian physicist called Leo Szilard reads it, has the actual idea for nuclear fission, and spends the next decade persuading the President of the United States that an atom bomb is possible.

On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 in the morning, a bombardier named Thomas Ferebee drops the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima. About seventy-thousand people die that morning. And eighty miles west, in a coal-mine tunnel running under the Inland Sea, Flanagan’s father, an Australian prisoner of war about to die of cold and starvation, is suddenly going to live. The war will end. He will be free.

Which is to say: Rebecca West has an affair with H. G. Wells, and half a century later the author, Richard Flanagan, gets to be born.

Flanagan won the Booker Prize in 2014 for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. In November 2024, Question 7 won Britain’s Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction. With that win, Flanagan became the first author in history to win both the Booker Prize for fiction and the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction. An ‘unprecedented double,’ the prize’s director called it.

Asked by The Guardian how he felt about a book being called both a novel and a memoir, Flanagan said: ‘Delighted. Labels are for jam jars.’

Question 7 is short — about a hundred and eighty pages; the kind of book where you finish a chapter and have to sit still for a minute before starting the next one. It’s a beautifully built thing, this book. If you love a writer who can move you from a Japanese coal mine to a London flirtation to a river rapid in Australia, and make it all feel like the same continuous question — then this book might be exactly what you’re looking for.

Rebecca West and H. G. Wells were completely wrong for each other, they were completely right; she saw he wouldn’t leave his wife, he saw she needed a wife; they jarred each other and annoyed each other from the beginning and from the beginning they were inextricably physically attracted to each other. He thought love was just common sense, she thought it was a way of losing it, he was for sex without love, she was for the whole damn business. He believed he was reinventing literature as a form of proselytising journalism, while she wrote many years after their affair ended, as if still arguing with him, that art was ‘not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted’, and the book she wrote those words in, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, reinvented journalism as literature, prefiguring much of what literature would become.

They should never have met, they were destined for each other, he would make her life and destroy her life and she would make her life in spite of his life, he would be an inexhaustible source of love and friendship for her for the next thirty-five years, he would madden her, he would win her and lose her and win her, she would be the one person he cared to see to the end, and to her immense surprise only after his death would she discover within herself the one thing she had never expected: a crack in the cup of life that opened into a desolation that was utter and inconsolable. — Richard Flanagan

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