Blending memoir and history and auto-fiction, this brilliantly unique book by the Booker winner is a treatise on the immeasurability of life
Reading Question 7 in the aftermath of recent news, from the referendum failure to enshrine an Indigenous voice in the Australian constitution, during the days that have followed Hamas’ brutal attack on an Israeli kibbutz one soft Saturday morning, to the declaration of war, again, the scale of human suffering eclipsing all reason – I felt an immense sense of clarity. Clarity might not be the right sentiment, perhaps it’s a lightness, a levitation as witness – I cannot quite place it, but as Question 7 exposes so astonishingly, words are faulty things.
Booker prize winner Richard Flanagan’s 12th book stands alone in its structure and its thread of thought as it bisects his oeuvre between the fictive and the factual. It is a brilliant meditation on the past of one man and the history that coalesced in his existence. Judgment befalls Flanagan again and again, and by his own pen, the irrefutable details of his birth and eventual death are writ large in a shame that he wrestles with as if meeting some beast; or, like the sentiment from Rebecca West to HG Wells – their tumultuous affair plays a pivotal role on these pages – some “beautiful voice singing out of a darkened room into which one gropes and finds nothing”.
Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?
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