A distinguished writer once told a group of acolytes, of which I was a member, that he could recognise a good poem because of the physically intoxicating effect it had on him when he reached the end – “like quaffing a large whiskey”.  When I reached the end of QUESTION 7 I felt as if I’d just glugged an entire bottle of Scotch and been simultaneously bludgeoned by an ice cold waterfall. As Anne Enright’s blurb announces, here is a book “itching to be quoted and underlined. A high reaching philosophical enquiry that is also fully personal” containing “indelible, morally piercing moments about atrocity, inheritance, nature and the colonial experience.”

Actually there’s more to it even than that and if you can’t find some strand within this multi-layered  deviously twisting narrative that shocks, delights or enthralls you then maybe reading is just not your bag. Where to start in this cornucopia of treats? How about with “Is it a memoir or is it a work of fiction?” Clearly it draws on Flanagan’s own family and personal history but it also manages to weave into the narrative fanciful sub plots about the HG Wells/Rebecca West relationship, about the strange paranoid life of Leo Szilard and his fellow scientists who became responsible for developing nuclear weapons, about Chekhov and his fictional stories, about anti-semitism, and much else besides. Here is a white hot authorial imagination trying passionately to integrate a fascinating cross section of ideas into a resonating meaningful parable and to evacuate simultaneously the rage and bitterness that exists in him. You may think (and indeed complain) that this is a memoir but for me it has the verve and the feel of a novel. It transcends any mealy mouthed simplistic attempts to label it and I applaud Flanagan’s innovative boldness at not playing the straightforward genre game.

Chekov was a prolific short story writer and one of my favourites but the two tales referenced here I never recall reading. The first is a fable that scuppers the modern idea that the answers to all questions can be found in metrics. (Don’t the quantum physicists and cosmologists of today just dote on their fantasy numbers and algorithms?)  Who loves longer, a man or a woman? Chekov asks and of course there is no answer. The writer’s point is that so far as the profoundest questions in life are concerned there are never any final conclusive answers. The human dilemma is this: we have consciousness and rationality and curiosity in bucket loads but we remain a mystery to ourselves. Take humanity’s warlike nature and barbarity as an instance. Our inherent inwardlooking tribalism and racism as another.  How do we explain it? All our attempts to find a rational answer just lead to further unanswerable questions, Flanagan suggests. The appalling onion of mystery always has more layers.

The second Chekov tale is called A Case History and is referenced towards the end of Flanagan’s book. Why do both the strong and the weak fall victim to their own relationships with one another? it asks. By this time Flanagan has taken us on a dazzling journey through his Irish settler family history in Tasmania, through the mass extinction then assimilation of Aborigines, through his father’s experiences as a slave labouring POW in Japan, through the relationship between HG Wells and Rebecca West, through the US bombing of Hiroshima and through the scientist Leo Szilard’s involvement with others in the discovery and development of nuclear fission. All these narrative strands are cleverly linked and juxtaposed so that they become integral to the Question 7 story. But the tour de force is yet to come. It is an exhaustive and exhausting true tale of how Flanagan came close to drowning in a kayak, so close in fact that in some quasi mystical way the incident came to represent a rebirth. “Afterwards the world appeared before me with extraordinary clarity,” he attests. “I wanted to live in this clarity forever.”

Unfortunately he is not able to. As the flashbacks become less frequent and his damaged body heals, that euphoric lucidity recedes back into drab normality. It is dismissed as a temporary illusion. He describes himself clutching onto the earth as it spins in irrational senselessly repeating cycles. Nothing has meaning. None of the whys he asks ever have a rational answer. Ultimate explanations do not exist. Existentially this is a gloomy ending to a brilliantly told story and yet days later I feel perplexed. I don’t know how far I can go along with the author’s nihilism. I wonder about his obsessive way of regarding the world, his reliance on a cerebral approach to understanding it, his thwarted need to believe that rationality is the only tool available to help him manage that task. There seems to be an emotional and spiritual dimension missing in Flanagan. I myself have long believed that rationality can take us only so far in coming to a healthy relationship with what passes for reality..

So what is this book finally about? On the one hand it documents the unpredictability, the randomness, the red in tooth and claw barbarity of human life; on the other it celebrates creative genius and the redeeming if ephemeral power of love. The man P is acting out of love in saving Flanagan’s life every bit as much as Flanagan’s hard-pressed under-resourced parents are in raising six children. Yet Flanagan turns away from P, allows his saviour just to slip out of his life. When in old age his mother wants him to house her, Flanagan refuses. Is this then a story driven by the author’s sense of guilt and emotional inadequacy? I suspect in some part it is. Mea culpa might serve as just as good a title as Question 7.

One way I choose to defend myself from the kind of despair Flanagan goes in for is by suggesting that if scientists like Fermi, Szilard etc can discover a way to split the atom, thereby releasing a chain reaction of hugely destructive energy, may it not happen that some other types of scientists eventually come along (in the field of genetic biology or neuroscience perhaps) who discover a way to cure us collectively of the deadly neural itch and ontological insecurity that determines humanity’s compulsive warmongering ways? A penicillin of the psyche perhaps? A modification of the genome? These may not be wild and wooly sci-fi ideas. If we have eliminated so many of the worst diseases of the body, who is to say we cannot also eliminate the aberrations of the tribal mind? (I notice UK scientists have just found a way to edit pigs’ genes to make them resistant to swine fever.) 

But that’s just me and this caveat did not detract from my enjoyment of the book. I’d much rather read a depressive who is as intelligent as Flanagan than the fantasy ramblings of an evangelically happy but mediocre mind. And you never know, in his next book Flanagan might just choose to address this crucial issue of how to keep that trauma-engendered sense of euphoric lucidity alive in perpetuity?