Richard Flanagan: ‘I’m not sure that I will write again’
The Tasmanian novelist – whose latest book, Question 7, is up for both fiction and nonfiction prizes – on HG Wells, the TV adaptation of his Booker prize winner The Narrow Road to the Deep North… and his much-missed parrot, Herb
Richard Flanagan, 63, lives in Tasmania, his birthplace. His sixth novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which drew on his father’s experience as a Japanese prisoner of war, won the 2014 Booker prize and is about to become a TV series starring Saltburn’s Jacob Elordi. His latest book, Question 7, is on the shortlist of this year’s Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction (to be awarded on 19 November), having also been shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina Étranger, a prize for novels. For the Spectator, it “uses an eccentric toolkit – part memoir, part history, part fictional imagining – to produce a book quite unlike anything else”; for Peter Carey, it “may just be the most significant work of Australian art in the last 100 years”.
How do you feel about Question 7 being up for a fiction prize as well as a nonfiction prize?
Delighted. Labels are for jam jars.
What led you to write it?
A mistaken diagnosis of early onset dementia in 2022. I was given at best 12 months before it would begin in earnest. In those 12 months I wrote the book. When done, I asked my editor if it showed any signs of cognitive collapse; if it did, I didn’t wish to see it published. She began laughing. The neurologist subsequently confirmed her opinion.
Which of the book’s many threads came first?
Once I had the idea of writing the book as a chain reaction that begins with Rebecca West kissing HG Wells and leads to 100,000 people dying in Hiroshima, my father living and me being born – once I understood that without that kiss, there would be no bomb and no me – then disparate things that had haunted me for so long fell into place. I thought much about my parents who, in a world they knew to be meaningless, nevertheless asserted an idea of love as their answer to the horrors out of which my island home is torn.
Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds is pivotal to the narrative. Do you remember the first time you read it?
I thought I knew the story – yet when I first read it, perhaps 20 years ago, I was staggered to learn in Wells’s introduction that it was inspired by the extermination of Aboriginal Tasmanians. It isn’t a hokey Edwardian set piece. It’s an indictment of English imperialism.
Are you a restless writer? Your books are similar to one another mainly in their difference …
I’m easily bored. And then there’s age. I seek forms that account not just for what’s lost but reflect what’s gained.
Were you inspired this time by the discursive turn that English-language fiction has taken since WG Sebald?
Fashions come and go. With this book, what mattered above all wasn’t literature, but life. During Covid, life for us all seemed on hold. The question I was left with was: do we wish to live, or are we content just to exist? And I think that question haunted many.
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