Running counter to this moralising dimension is a sense of dissociation. Flanagan writes of memory as a creative act,emphasising the fragmentation and unreliability of his recollections. Significantly,he casts himself as a spectral presence in his own book,alluding at several points to a near-death experience at the age of 21,when he nearly drowned while kayaking on the Franklin River — an incident that inspired his first book,Death of a River Guide. “Perhaps this is a ghost story,” he writes,“and the ghost me.”
From this estranged perspective,Flanagan makes a show of grasping at life’s ineffable essence,which remains stubbornly out of reach,something he attributes,in part,to the friability of words. He claims to have learned early in life that “the words of the book are never the book,the soul of it is everything” — a nonsensical distinction,but one that might go some way toward explaining his book’s uneven tone.
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In context,Flanagan is referring to a book’s intention or expressive purpose. But,of course,that does not sound quite so profound. And that rhetorical quality becomes an issue.
The grand themes pursued inQuestion 7 sit uneasily with its anecdotal,essayistic style. When Flanagan makes expansive philosophical gestures,his language is caught between the sententious and the trite. Depicting the victims of Hiroshima as ascending “souls” is cloying,and adopting “that’s life” as a catchphrase in the manner of Kurt Vonnegut’s “so it goes” seems a bad misjudgment,partly because “life” encompasses everything and thus explains nothing,but mostly because it gives a dismissive shrug when the book should be rising to its subject.
Question 7 performs a reverse Melville. Instead of expanding its subject to a condition of universality,it shrinks its historical material down to a personal scale. It does not answer its unanswerable questions (how could it?),but it eventually places them to one side,returning in its final section to that near-death experience on the Franklin River.
It is a brilliantly controlled piece of writing,easily the best thing in the novel. The profound experience of facing death brings Flanagan as close as he gets to grasping that elusive term “life”.
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