Reader Review - Question 7 by Richard Flanagan
In 1913 HG Wells, infatuated with Rebecca West, but married to another woman and living with a mistress, wrote a book about the end of the world. In the 1930s, Hungarian Jewish physicist and inventor Leo Szilard, living in England after the Nazis came to power, read HG Wells' book and conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction. Ten years later, the Americans dropped the result of this idea onto Hiroshima, killing perhaps 100,000 people, but saving the life of Archie Flanagan, the author's father who was had been imprisoned as a Japanese slave labourer for four years.
Without Rebecca West’s kiss H.G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H.G. Wells’s book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them.
Scaffolded by Wells, West, and Szilard, of the atomic bomb and war, Flanagan segues into the dark chapters of his own Tasmanian heritage. He grapples with the brutal genocide of the Aboriginal population by European colonists, a legacy that undeniably stains his own ancestry, and dissects Tasmania's rigid social hierarchy, where the remaining Aboriginal people and convicts languished at the bottom rung beneath the free settlers. He weaves this into a personal history, exploring how his war-scarred father and his mother, trapped by domesticity and six children, shaped his own upbringing. The narrative also mirrors the ongoing environmental destruction of Tasmania's natural wildernesses, with the ravaged rainforests and rivers echoing the desolate imagery of an atomic war. Perhaps the most gripping section details Flanagan's harrowing personal experience: a near-drowning ordeal at 21, trapped upside down in a kayak on a remote river. Only his friend's valiant, hours-long efforts saved him.
Listening to the audiobook, narrated in Flanagan's own rough Australian accent was a deeply impacting experience. His poetic lilt adds a layer of gravitas and respect, both to the horrors of war and the nuances of family dynamics.
