I have started a book club with two friends, Simon Peters and David Bradshaw. It came about during one of my long chats with David in Bread and Milk, a cafe on Trafalgar Street in Brighton’s North Laine. We often spend hours talking about life, the universe, and everything. One consistent theme has always been the books that we both have been reading. I can’t remember which one of us suggested it first, but we fell on the idea of starting a book club. I immediately thought of another friend, Simon Peters, with whom I’d had an ongoing, mutual, book recommending, email exchange for the last few months. David and Simon didn’t know each other, but I thought they would be sure to get on. We had an initial kick-off meeting where we tossed (digital) dice to decide who would choose the first book. I won, so of course I simply picked the next book from my interwar reading list, which was Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. I wrote the review that you find here before our first real meeting, so the book club didn’t feature; I would have read it anyway, so it didn’t feel relevant. We had an excellent and enjoyable evening at the White Hart in Lewes to discuss it. Simon’s choice was next. He first chose Giles Milton’s Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, but when I said I’d read it, and despite my protestations that I’d happily read it again, he offered his second choice, this book, Richard Flanagan’s Question 7. I ordered this handsome hardback copy from Amazon the minute I got home.

I wasn’t aware of the book or Richard Flanagan before Simon suggested it, although I was dimly aware of his novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, that has been dramatised as a TV series. It apparently won the Man Booker Prize. Wikipedia notes that he is “Considered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation”. This book, Question 7, won the Gifford Prize, which is Britain’s foremost non-fiction prize. He was born in 1961, so very much my own generation. He was at Oxford with Boris Johnson, who appears briefly as a “Martian” in the book (more on this later). Question 7 is a unique concoction; partly a straightforward memoir; partly an exploration of his ancestry, especially his ethical attitude to it; partly a meditation on cause, effect, and unforeseen consequences; and partly a loving memorial to his mother and father. The “Question 7” of the title refers to a nonsense, non-sequitur, maths question devised by Chekhov. It starts as a simple question of algebra, but ends as an emotional, human, question about love. It’s the perfect metaphor for the unsolvable moral quandaries that Flanagan sets, but leaves the reader to resolve.

The book opens with the story of his father’s experience as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese during World War II. He travels to the site of his father’s final camp, on the Inland Sea, where he worked as a slave labourer in a coal mine. There is no memorial, and very little local memory of it. He is introduced to an ex-guard, who he imagines might have beaten his father. The local press ask that he embrace the guard, which he reluctantly does. He artfully invokes his emotional and intellectual confusion about how he should feel. Should the camp be memorialised? Should anyone now care about what happened there? Should he hate the guard, now a frail old man?

He introduces a second historical story about a love affair between Edwardian literary icon, H G Wells, and contemporary feminist, Rebecca West. He doesn’t explain how this is connected until much later in the book, so it all feels rather random at first. In Flanagan’s mind, the love affair motivated Wells to write his, now rather forgotten, novel, The World Set Free. Next he introduces Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, who was inspired by Well’s novel to conceive of a nuclear chain reaction, and thus the atomic bomb. He later moved to the US in the 1930s, escaping Nazi persecution. He was instrumental in persuading first Einstein and then president Roosevelt to create the Manhattan project. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing of Japan brought the war to an abrupt end, thus saving Flanagan’s father from probable death. The line of causation is revealed. Flanagan muses that his life is the consequence of an Edwardian love affair and is balanced against the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese.

Later in the book, Flanagan again uses an H G Wells novel, one of his greatest, War of the Worlds, as a metaphor for the genocide of the Tasmanian aborigines. In the novels, the Martians, looking for lands to colonise, attempt to exterminate human life. For Flanagan, the English are the Martians, and Tasmania was a genocidal slave society. As a young man he won a scholarship to Oxford and entered the belly of the Martian beast. The dislike is palpable. He describes encountering Boris Johnson, although he’s not explicitly named, and it’s clear Flanagan considers him the epitome of Martian-ness; a boorish, racist, snob.

Much of the book is straightforwardly autobiographical. He writes about his childhood in Tasmania and his family’s move to the remote mining village of Rosebury in the west of the island. He describes the destruction of the ancient temperate rainforests that he has witnessed in his lifetime. Cleared to make way for farming. He describes his mother, her life and her death. He writes about their poverty and their constrained lives. It seems his mother was well liked and a thoroughly decent person despite all the challenges of her life. In the final chapter Flanagan describes in great detail the moment he almost drowned while kayaking on the Franklin river. It is very dramatically narrated and sounds horrific. And one can well believe it was a turning point in his life.

There’s no doubt Flanagan is a superb writer. The prose is a joy to read. The book is also constantly challenging. It poses repeated Question 7s to the reader; unsolvable moral quandaries. On the other hand, at times I found the writing rather irritating, a kind of pretentious cod-profundity of beautiful nonsense. It’s poetic, but much seemed meaningless. Is that the point? Is it all a Question 7? Flanagan ends most chapters with the two words, “That’s life”, a authorial shrug, as if to say to the reader, “I don’t have the answers”. It’s a little disingenuous, because he has clear intentions about how the reader should think about many of the questions he raises.

Some of his major themes should be challenged though. Can we really say that H G Wells’ love affair with Rebecca West was ultimately responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of Japanese, and the survival of Flanagan’s father? Surely that’s just a neat excuse for an intriguing book, rather than a serious historical assertion? I’m rather more of a believer in the inevitably of technological progress. The atomic bomb would have been invented sooner or later, regardless of whether Wells had kissed West and then written The World Set Free. If not Szilard, some other physicist would have conceived of a chain reaction. Even if the atomic bomb hadn’t been developed by the end of WWII, it is clear that the Japanese were desperately looking for an end to the war by the summer of 1945. Historians such as Anthony Beevor argue that they were as much pressured into unconditional surrender by the Red Army’s rapid advance through Manchuria and the imminent Soviet invasion of Hokkaido as by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. It was just the justification the emperor used in his famous speech. The USAAF was already flattening one city after another. One reason Hiroshima was chosen, was because it had, so far, escaped attention.

Flanagan’s questions about historical guilt are also misguided. There has to be a historical statute-of-limitations, or the world would fester in ever-lasting ethnic and national feuds. Peace in Europe has been maintained since 1945, by the rule that the borders are now fixed and everyone collectively agrees not to attempt to rectify historical “wrongs”. This is why Russia’s violation of this principle with the invasion of Ukraine is so egregious. Of course history must be remembered and recorded, but it should not be used as an excuse to victimise the present. One cannot blame today’s Germans for the Nazi death camps, today’s Japanese for the appalling treatment of POWs in WWII, or today’s British for the Tasmanian genocide. Flanagan is, of course, free to excoriate Boris Johnson and his fellow Bullingdonites for their snobbish and boorish behaviour, I’d be right there to egg him on, but they are not the “Martians” that wiped out the aborigines, and it’s rather evil to suggest they are in some way responsible.