Question 7

Archie Flanagan is Richard Flanagan’s father—a central figure in the text, whose experiences undergird the text’s thematic interest in Memory, Understanding, and Forgiveness. Like many of the other people from Flanagan’s immediate circle, he never mentions his father by name in Question 7. He describes his father as a complex man who experienced tremendous hardship and subsequently sought a simple life as a schoolmaster in rural Tasmania. Flanagan writes compassionately about his father even as he recognizes his father’s limitations. Flanagan introduces him as “a quiet and reserved man who neither disciplined me nor encouraged me nor praised me, he was for the most part vaporous, there and not there, substance and non-substance” (41).

Flanagan’s father’s reticence is well-illustrated toward the end of Question 7 when Flanagan writes about telling his father about his scholarship to Oxford. Instead of praising him lavishly and warmly, as some parents might do, Flanagan’s father simply quotes British colonial writer Rudyard Kipling. He does not even turn to look at his son. Other writers might write about this moment with bitterness, as many people seek praise from their parents. In contrast, Flanagan demonstrates his understanding of his “vaporous” father by simply laughing in response.

Flanagan frames his father’s quiet nature in the context of the trauma he suffered as a prisoner of war in Japan during WWII. In Question 7, Flanagan visits Japan when his father is 97 years old to better understand what his father experienced in the camp. When Flanagan tells his father about his findings, his father “stopped talking” and hung up the call (211). Flanagan’s father is reluctant to talk about these moments, even seeming “offended” by stories of his own bravery during that time. Even though it was something that deeply impacted him, or, as Flanagan suggests, because it was such an impactful event, Flanagan’s father preferred to withdraw from stories about this history and, indeed, the world more generally.

Helen Flanagan is Flanagan’s mother, and she plays a secondary role in Question 7. Like Flanagan’s father and other family members, she goes unnamed in the text. Flanagan presents his mother as a complex figure, describing her as a strong, vibrant woman constrained by her circumstances who nevertheless made the best of her lot in life.

Flanagan’s mother grew up on a farm in northwest Tasmania and held to the values and lessons she learned there throughout her life. Flanagan’s account suggests that one of the lessons she most closely internalized was the traditional role of women in the home. She had the difficult task of running a household while caring for a sick husband, five children and her own mother. She would cook and serve food to the other members of the household first, reserving only table scraps for herself. As much as Flanagan admires her for her strength and loving nature, he laments how she lived in “a time and a place that allowed her so little else, this strong remarkable woman who couldn’t be who she really was” (176). Flanagan understands his mother and why she acted as she did, but he resents the “abasement” she put herself through.

Flanagan’s mother’s death marks a turning point in Flanagan’s life. After the trauma of his near-death experience at 21, Flanagan feared death. However, he was touched by his mother’s grace and kindness in her final days. She passed away peacefully, surrounded by family. Through spending time at his mother’s bedside, Flanagan saw “that dying, as well as sometimes being terrifying, can, if you were lucky and if you knew grace, also be serene” (183). Her peaceful death was testament to the love she showed others throughout her life.

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), or H. G. Wells, was a prolific British writer known as “the father of science fiction.” He wrote dozens of novels, including The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and War of the Worlds (1898). War of the Worlds, as described in Question 7, “had its genesis in the attempted genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people” (218). Flanagan repeatedly refers to Wells’s novels throughout Question 7, both in his own personal reflections and his commentary on historical events.

Flanagan’s slightly fictionalized account of Wells in Question 7 contributes to his exploration of the interconnected nature of art and history. When Flanagan first presents Wells in Part 1, he depicts him as an idealist whose most famous works were behind him. Up-and-coming firebrands like Rebecca West were harping on his hypocrisy for preaching a progressive lifestyle while living a more-or-less conventional private life, albeit one with multiple extramarital affairs. Flanagan contextualizes Wells’s meeting and subsequent affair with Rebecca West as taking place concurrent to his growing fascination with new discoveries in radioactivity which promised to overcome “entropy”—the idea of the inevitable running down of all life as energy itself runs out” (79). The combination of West and Wells’s kiss, which serves as a metaphorical “spark,” and this new understanding of radioactivity leads to the development of the novel The World Set Free, about nuclear apocalypse. Flanagan writes, “the confusion of Wells’s new novel mirrored the confusion of the life of a man with a wife and a mistress now feeling the gravitational pull of a third woman he desperately wishe[d] to exorcise from his panicked sou […] (83). Flanagan fictionalizes the exchanges between Wells and West to illustrate this point, in keeping with his structural principle of counterposing nonfiction with what he feels is emotionally if not factually true.