On the evening of Saturday May 25, the novelist Richard Flanagan spoke to Kerry O’Brien at the Sydney Writers Festival about his new book Question 7 (2023).
Question 7, a book that is neither novel nor memoir — yet is somehow both — is a mixture of narratives. It concerns the early development of the atomic bomb, and its influence on Flanagan’s father’s life, and the history of Tasmania. The story also flows along the eddies and creeks of Tasmania’s rivers. As Tara June Winch observes, “here everything that has ever burnt the author becomes an elixir, a balm for everything that happened before he was born,” and, indeed, as Flanagan observed in his talk, one’s “responsibilies to both the past and the future.”
To say that the talk was a simple whistlestop book-tour discussion, would be to do Flanagan a great disservice. Instead, it was an opportunity for Flanagan to speak on a wide range of topics, and it was to our good fortune that we were able to hear him speak.
O’Brien began by asking Flanagan about the driving force behind his recent writing of Question 7.
To Flanagan, the motivation for writing lay in the realisation that “the world I’d grown up in” had changed. Flanagan spoke of feeling as if he was in “a strange autumn of things.” In a way, it was also an attempt at reconciling the incongruity that, as he put it, he “only existed because of this enormous crime [the atomic bomb].”
For Flanagan, it became clear that writing is a tool of preservation. I began to get the sense that, in writing, Flanagan was a man who hoped to take what he saw as certainties, and use them as vehicles to understand.
Perhaps most profound was Flanagan’s view of the relationship between the author and the reader. He suggested Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata (1889) and how it had long been read as a novel about sex and jealousy. Realising this, Tolstoy published a clarifying epilogue. Flanagan’s response to this was to argue that once a work is published, its meaning is changed by readers. He declared, beautifully, that readers “bless your words with their whole history, their soul.”
Speaking again about his book, Flanagan talked about how it explored his relationship with his mother. Flanagan spoke of how she had been held back from her full potential by circumstances. He observed that the “lives of true courage” are the lives lived by everyday people. Amongst the most beautifully put of Flanagan’s sentiments was that it was the novelist’s opportunity to explore the lives of ordinary people who are nevertheless able to make a profound and lasting impact.
Similarly, Flanagan discussed Australia’s relationship with history. He made a clear point about Australian cultural self-identity being non-European as he saw it, and that “until we can recognise our past there can be no possibility for the future.” For a writer who writes many period novels, it was revelatory to hear first-hand his view of historiography, considering that history and characters’ understandings of the past play such a role in his writings.
As for his view of literature, Flanagan spoke of how “great books begin in that surface reality of tables and clocks and slips into the world of who loves longer and how to live.” He noted that he wrote out “of awareness of consciousness.”
Finally, when pressed if he was going to write anything more after Question 7, Flanagan said “not books, no” and that since writing it, he had been overcome by a stillness.
The evening ended, and Flanagan, the chronicler of the Australian soul and the value of the ordinary individual in what he called the “indifferent world,” slipped once again behind the dark curtain that hung behind the theatre stage. Though he left, his words stayed within all those who heard him.
