The title refers to a story by Chekhov, highlighting the absurdity of asking the wrong questions:
"One of Chekhov's earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov's question 7 is typical:
Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order camethat the train had to reach station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?
Who? You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer? And why do we do what we do to each other? That's question 7. (p. 24)
On the value of writing:
"That's what I couldn't see then that I see now, that though it happened then it's still happening now and it won't ever stop happening, and that writing about it, that writing about anything, can't be an opinion about what happened as if it had already happened when it is still happening, still unintelligible, still mysterious, and all writing is trapped in tenses when life isn't. Life is always happening and has happened and will happen, and the only writing that can have any worth confounds time and stands outside of it, swims with it and flies with it and dives deep within it, seeking the answer to one insistent question: who loves longer?" (p. 99)
On the future of our world:
"In any case, what remains will be a wet gravel desert amidst which will be found impoundments of dead water, ash heaps and tailings dams, charred tree stumps and open-cut holes, rusting derricks and cranes and ancillary structures, bricks and corro where women once washed in the incessant rain and the cold, so much detritus mirrored in dark, toxic puddles oozing heavy metals and acid and poisons. But of that annihilated civilisation: nothing.
A masked owl, the last of its kind, its riddling face outlined with a heart and bisected by a murderer's beak, will spread its ermine spotted wings and leave the last tree, searching for a home now gone forever, chittering an imminent oblivion.We will have arrived back on Wells's time traveller's dying beach, alone, in a dimming twilight. If I were a sculptor this would be my art: rusting machinery without purpose rising out of oily scum. People might see it as beauty or meaning. But they would be wrong. It would be what remains. Nothing." (p. 149)
On his hearing impairment:
"And now it is not Ratty or Peter, nor Cisco and Pancho, but me and my sister and most of all my mother and father who briefly shape out of the static and rain only to recede back into vaporous memory when I reach out for them. It remains for me to invent what has happened in order to hold them close a little longer. But almost immediately everything starts crumbling into confusions that muddle sweet, salted roast mutton scraps on buttery toast we ate for Sunday breakfast with a spoon of foul-tasting grenadine-coloured medicine for worms that our mother chased us around the house trying to get us to swallow; the joys of childhood with the growing pain and bewilderment of those years as my deafness grew worse, as people became harder to comprehend, and I struggled to be understood with my increasingly poor language. Only when we moved to Hobart was my condition correctly diagnosed and my hearing rectified with a series of minor operations. Without Rosebery, without its alcoholic doctor who failed to diagnose my condition leading to compounding complications, I would never have known that strange nether world of isolation and pain I did in those years of deafness, when slowly I gathered that people thought I was simple." (p.180)
On the atrocity of the Tasmanian genocide:
"The War of the Worlds had its genesis in the attempted genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. In a 1920 interview with Strand magazine, H. G. Wells attributed the idea of the book to a remark of his brother Frank, to whom he dedicated the novel. They had been talking ''of the discovery of Tasmania by the Europeans - a very frightful disaster for the native Tasmanians." ''We were walking together through some particularly peaceful Surrey scenery. 'Suppose some beings from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly,' said he, 'and begin laying about them here!'''In the first chapter of The War of the Worlds, Wells makes the connection explicit ''Before we judge them [the Martians] too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?" (p. 220)
But the real reason of all the subjects, is the power of literature: the curious link between the book "War of the Worlds" by HG Wells to nuclear physics and to the atom bomb.
"I only write this book that you are now reading, no more than a love note to my parents and my island home, a world that has vanished, because over a century ago another writer wrote a book that decades later seized another mind with such force that it became a reality that reshaped the world. It was a story of horror that was his fear of love, complete love without measure or boundary, and he created in its place an idea of destruction without limit. In this way, the world begat a book that would in turn beget the world.
Without Rebecca West's kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells's book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project and without the Manhattan Project there is no lever at 8:15 a.m. on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them." (p 237, 238)
Flanagan has achieved something truly exceptional. A wake-up call for humanity - one more. It deserves to be read very widely.
Brilliant!
