Question 7
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15
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By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die. At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, place and memory is about how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.
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What an extraordinary piece of literature this is. Flanagan has written a line of history that starts back with H.G.Wells and The War of the Worlds, through to the initial thinking and development of the atom bomb, through his father's experience of being a POW in Japan working in brutal conditions until Hiroshima, and reaching back through his family history to the genocidal war against the original people of his homeland Tasmania.
His prose becomes arresting and in places I was in tears. The novel has time jumps between the things I mentioned earlier as he weaves a family history through some of the most momentous elements of the last hundred years and beyond. The consequent blending of the lives of so many people forms a mesh of humanity in which he feels uncomfortably at home.
