Question 7

by Richard Flanagan

“Money,” my father would say, “is like shit. Pile it up and it stinks. Spread it around and you can grow things.”

War, my father told me decades later, is the ultimate obscenity.

Of the many necessary illusions that enable a writer to write, two are paramount—one, the vanity they can write a good book, and the other the conceit that a good book will be read by good readers, people with the insight to recognise what is good within it. But, of course, good readers are as rare as good writers, perhaps even rarer, and most books in consequence find only poor readers. Writers rail against misunderstanding, but poor writers prosper by being misunderstood, some even accidentally elevated into the pantheon of greatness in consequence, the bad clay of their work forever after glazed with the good fortune of brilliant readings. In a similar way my father blessed every court report and obituary notice with the weight of a remarkable life, finding unexpected depths and breadths in the thinnest journalese and kitschest sentiment, the words nothing, the drift of them everything.

memories too have their moment. There is a time for forgetting and a time for remembering and then even that time becomes a memory and, after a further time, nothing at all.

When I died on the Franklin River at the age of twenty-one it was as I had always known it would be. Everything ever since has been an astonishing dream.

I was struck at the death of both my mother and father how within only minutes of passing, their face was no longer them and yet it remained their face. After twenty-one I stole my face back from death but it was not my face. I saw bodies and faces that were me but which I hadn’t been allowed, rather this stranger’s body and face, like borrowed clothes at once too loose and too tight and smelling wrong. But there was nothing else to wear and so we got on with it, me and this ill-fitting costume that bears my name.

the feeling standing next to a 13,000-year-old Huon pine on Mount Read made all of European literature look like the wild posturings of adolescents: so much juvenilia.

My mother and my father in their stories and jokes, in their generosity and kindness to others, asserted the necessary illusion their lives might mean something in the endless tumult of this meaningless universe. For them to live, love had to exist, the love they valued above all things; they lived that love and they fought for that love and defended that love. With the passing of time this illusion became their hard-won truth. It was a form of magic and they the magicians. In my vanity, I had always thought of them as naïve. Only now writing these words do I finally see the naïveté was all mine.

Little Boy is generally accepted to have exploded with a force equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT. However, a major postwar US government report, the Strategic Bombing Survey, analysing the effect of aerial bombing in the Second World War, estimated that the same blast and fire effect of the Little Boy explosion could have been achieved with 2,100 tons of conventional bombs. In other words, the bombing of Vietnam can be calculated as the equivalent of either 500 Hiroshima bombs (at 15,000 tons) or, using the Strategic Bombing Survey figures, the equivalent of 3,571 Hiroshima bombs (at 2,100 tons). It is impossible to accurately quantify in a war that saw more than three million die, of whom two million were civilians, how many died from aerial bombing. We remember Hiroshima. Who, other than the Vietnamese, remembers the Vietnamese dead? Other than the Cambodians, the Cambodian dead? The Laotians, the Laotian dead?

Tragedy is sometimes understood as the conflict of one good against another. A more nuanced form of this idea is that tragedy is the conflict between what is perceived to be a lesser evil against what is perceived to be a greater evil. Tragedy exerts its hold upon our imaginations because it reminds us that justice is an illusion. Hiroshima is the great tragedy of our age from which we continue to seek understanding and yet can never understand.

I realise writing this that memory is as much an act of creation as it is of testimony, and that one without the other is a tree without its trunk, wings without a bird, a book without its story.

I liked people who didn’t want to talk about it. Because there was nothing to talk about. There were no words. That’s the thing about words: they are not the same thing as life. We just pretend. And I couldn’t.