Richard Flanagan, Question 7

 

- This is a fascinating book. It's not just a memoir, it's a highly emotional mixture of passion, anger and reflection. I found it utterly absorbing. We're taken to Hiroshima and the atom bomb, the novels of H.G.Wells, the scientific geniuses Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein, Flanagan's mother and his former Prisoner of War father, and the colonial extermination of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. 

- There are echoes of Flanagan's previous novels throughout, mainly Death of a River Guide and brilliant The Narrow Road to the Deep North. 

- Over the course of his life certain events have become seared in his mind, and his telling of them incites immense anger which the reader can feel and share. 

- Like this one: At 8.15am on 6 August 1945, bombardier Major Thomas Ferebee released a lever 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, said 'Bomb away!, and forty-three seconds later 60,000 people died while eighty miles to the south my father, a near-naked slave labourer in his fourth year of captivity as a prisoner of war, continued with his gruelling work pushing carriages of rock up long dark tunnels that ran under the Inland Sea.

- And this one: a war of extermination, a war the Tasmanian Aboriginal people finally lost... Exiled to slums and an island reserve and silence, renamed and reviled as islanders and abos and boongs and half-castes and troublemakers, they could be called any vile humiliation imaginable but what they were: the original human inhabitants of the island. 

- We're taken back to the origin of nuclear physics and the splitting of the atom. The scientist Leo Szilard was terrified the world could be destroyed. He was inspired by the futuristic novels of H.G.Wells, and it seemed obvious that Nazi Germany would become the first country in the world to develop nuclear weapons. That was horrific. 

- Humanity was likely to be extinguished. 

- And as for bomber Thomas Ferebee, look at the precision aerial bombing of France during the war, and the carpet bombing of Vietnam twenty years later. Many more thousands of people died than in Hiroshima. Ferebee was involved in both. Our American hero. 

- Flanagan takes us to his awakening as a young student in Oxford. The world there was grey… dreary and dispirited… where mediocrity was a virtue called tradition...The English were Martians. ‘Dirty little East End Jew. Go home to the colonies, convict. Women smell of slime, don’t you think? Hey, Paki - oi! Fif-faf-fuddle!' That was the true language of Oxford, its necessary language of hate.

- The final chapter is an exquisite telling of his near drowning in a kayak in the Franklin River. He was only twenty one and came very close to death. But, miraculously, he survived through the help of a courageous friend. He wasn't extinguished. As the world itself has so far survived. 

- And, by the way, his father lived until he was ninety-four. 

- Flanagan has written a thoroughly inspiring work. Brilliant.