The unbearable brilliance of Question 7
I’ve been jet lagged these past 16 years. For almost all of my life until 2010, the year started, with its concomitant resolutions, in September/October and ran until June/July. The year ended with the end of summer, a change in the air, the first intimations of the days closing in, the increasing frequency of damp mornings. Autumn has ever been my favorite season, not just for the soft days and comforting fading, but also for the promise of a structured week after the unsettling freedom of the summer vacation. Some of you may relate to this.
Even after more than 15 years in Japan, where the school year begins in April and stutters briefly in March before launching again into a log-chute of wan activity, I have not fully adapted to the idea that this week—before second semester—is for most Japanese students and academics only an unremarkable pit stop on the way to February. Whereas for me, it is the main occasion for resolutions: this year, I will revise that class, resubmit that article, commit to a new project, be more effective, do better. Own my timetable…
It rarely works—that much should be obvious—but this is the time of year to give it my best shot. Not least because I am mindful of the encroaching evil that infects every aspect of our political and social lives: if, as seems likely, “we are all doomed”, we should go out as creatively as possible.
One of the few resolutions that has survived the first five days is to read the unread books on my bookshelf—the non-academic ones, life is too short for the others. Unfortunately, I have started with—and now completed—Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, which has sat on the shelf for a couple of years now.
It is a short, autobiographical, companion to the novel for which he is best known: The Narrow Road to the Deep North (which would be required reading in Japanese schools in a different universe where 20th century history—Hiroshima aside—was faced up to, rather than being erased. But that is (literally) another story.)
The reason that Question 7 is unbearable lies not in its subject matter, but in the arresting brilliance of the writing. Flanagan’s prose and emotional range is insanely good: an unmannered precision, eloquence without artifice. Articulate masculinity.
If I lived another lifetime, I could not write this well.
Next week: Peter Carey’s “A Long Way from Home” (by coincidence, another reckoning with Australian history)
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