A great Tasmanian writer, and lethal aircraft in California
A few posts in and I’m reframing my substack. Out goes ‘Books across the Pond’ – because, for the long haul, I can’t summon the enthusiasm to keep posting about the profession of writing. I’d rather write than that.
Instead, in comes ‘Between Two Worlds’ in which I’ll go deeper into what is interesting me. Sometimes that will be the business of writing, publishing, reading. Sometimes it will be environmental, spiritual, or personal reflections. Who knows what else it will be.
Today, it’s reading, lethal aircraft, and a sprinkling of wildflowers.
First the reading:
Richard Flanagan mines his life for his fiction – and now comes his memoir. ‘Question 7’ is a question posed by Chekov, culminating in ‘who loves longer?’ Flanagan’s is a bravura book, one of tight control even as it spans wide. It starts with Flanagan’s father, a POW in a Japanese camp on the ‘Death Railway’ – who would have been killed had the bomb not been dropped on Hiroshima. The book does not claim that as justification for the atom bomb, more concerned with abhorrence of war, but it recognizes the link between Hiroshima and his father’s survival as an arc of story that is alive that brings into being the Richard Flanagan who would not have been born without the bomb. Which would not have happened without a novel by H.G. Wells, whose tempestuous affair with Rebecca West is a fictionalized part of the tale. The moral dilemma behind the dropping of that first atom bomb is told more intimately and persuasively than the visual bombast of the film Oppenheimer. As a memoir the book gives a loving, detailed portrait of the shell-shocked father and his quiet wisdom ( I loved his line ‘Money is like shit. Pile it up and it stinks. Spread it around and things grow’). A concluding chapter is an intense battle with death on the Franklin River, Flanagan trapped in a broken kayak. The book is an exploration of being Tasmanian, replacing an exterminated Aboriginal people yet somehow imbuing a related sense of being from qualities of a primordial landscape that is facing its own extinction.
Question 7 is a book that lives inside you, which I think is Flanagan’s purpose for a book. It expresses a fourth tense, not past present or future but one which embraces all of those elements, a timeless living out. Such a tense redefines narrative, so while story progresses it doesn’t leave you in a place where everything is revealed and understood, but becomes a loop in which an effort to understand perhaps becomes a process of absorbing. The book is literary and human and strong and frail, and being such it merges with the life of the reader.
A focus of Flanagan’s Question 7 is the flight crew that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, which perhaps is what shifted my focus, from what was a busy week, to:
The Lethal Aircaft
An hour north of Los Angeles and you approach Palmdale, with its twin aircraft museums next to each other. One is the Blackbird Airpark, featuring a ‘a Lockheed SR-71A and its precursor, the A-12, as well as the once ultra-secret D-21 drone and the sole remaining U-2 “D” variant in the world.’ James loves these Blackbird aircraft the way he once loved cars, both facets of him that surprise me, so we wandered around in the shadow of his awe. The Blackbirds, high and fast ‘spy’ planes, stemmed from the 1950s and ’60s (in the same way James and I do) and even now they’re futuristic. Ex-military planes are on show at the Joe Davies Heitage Airpark next door, James calling me toward the F16 fighter, the B52 bomber and all such. I had to hold back. Visit the Nazi death camps, or Commonwealth wargrave sites, and for me it’s like entering a wall of grief. The deaths of multitudes cling to these places. Here, beside aircraft from which guns blazed and missiles launched and bombs dropped to kill countless thousands, it seemed necessary to atone. To pray for those who were annihilated. To question how rich nations steer wealth and human brilliance toward fashioning weapons of destruction, winning arguments through overwhelming force. Consider the true heritage of these aircraft, from the 1950s to now: Vietnam, Korea, the Iraq Wars. How forlorn and pitiable it is.
We continued from the desert plains of Antelope Valley to the hills on show for the Spring wildflower season, and the largest nature conservancy project in California, 240,000 acres of diverse and beautiful habitats. Appreciating and saving the planet we live on is the flipside of what we can do.