Question 7 by Richard Flanagan
Flanagan’s memoir of his father—though it is far more than simply a memoir—imparts fascinating historical information as well as rewarding food for the soul and imagination.
Early in the book, the author casually alludes to the time he died while kayaking on the Franklin River in Tasmania as a young man. To hear how that played out, however, we must wait till the end.
Meanwhile, we read how the long-term consequences of certain interactions among a disparate array of people literally shook the world. The historical facts around the development of the atomic bomb highlight the astonishing connections between imagination and reality.
The worlds we inhabit are constructs that reflect ethnic, cultural and national mythologies. A few experiences of the author’s time as a scholarship student at Oxford in the 1950s reveals the racist attitudes and comments reflecting the smug superiority considered quite acceptable among elite British scholars at that time.
As Flanagan points out, his fellow students had no compunction about denigrating the Tasmanian colonial, though their nation had taken over Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania) to use as a penal colony, and used their army to help the settlers carry out the “Black War” that dispossessed Aboriginal Tasmanians and nearly wiped them out.
(This story has great resonance for Canadians of my generation, who were taught a selective history in school that revealed nothing about the infamous residential schools run by churches and government, where aboriginal children were still suffering, and indeed continued to suffer as late as the 1990s.)
Turning to WWII, we see on the one hand how Thomas Ferrebee, the American who dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, expressed no regret about his action. Even after witnessing the incredible suffering caused by the atomic bomb, he accepted the justifications of the Allied side in general and his government in particular.
On the other hand, when the author travels to Japan to meet the commander who commanded the POW camp where his father suffered from overwork, casual cruelty and near-starvation, he is confronted by a massive amnesia. With the exception of a few individuals approach him to express their regrets for what was done to his father and other POWs during WWII, this chapter of history has been effectively wiped from the national memory. More astonishingly, it is gone from the minds of individuals who were there and took part.
Of particular interest to me was how Flanagan highlights the arbitrary nature of what used to be considered the formerly hard boundaries between what we define as fiction and non-fiction. Recently, there has been discussion about this among literati; this book highlights the value of such conversations.
Everything connects. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kurt Vonnegut, “a former POW who had survived the firebombing of Dresden,” was told a story idea that inspired Cat’s Cradle, one of his most celebrated novels. The World Set Free, HG Wells’ 1914 fictional prediction of a weapon resembling the atomic bomb, was read and studied by well known physicists including Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard. Actions they took after studying the book left Einstein burdened with a lifelong regret while Szilard lobbied frantically to have the genie returned to the bottle.
For all its the shocking content, the message of this book is more hopeful than dark. When Flanagan’s father dies in his late nineties, the author tells us, he has “lost all memory of his time in the POW camps.” He still knows at a factual level that this had happened to him, but he is freed of the weight of emotion that had gone with it.
“He had spent a lifetime pondering that short, terrible period of his life and through some slow reduction had distilled it down to one idea, one emotion, one truth: love.”