Flashman Revisited. The Genius of George Macdonald Fraser

I promised a few words about the ‘Flashman’ books by the late George Macdonald Fraser. I’ve written about them before, and also (I think so anyway - I certainly should have done if I haven’t) about Mr Fraser’s superb memoir of his time as a soldier in General Slim’s army in Burma, ‘Quartered Safe Out Here ‘(The title’s a quotation from Kipling). This must be one of the best descriptions of what modern warfare is actually like for the ordinary soldier, and is also very moving.

 

I’m urged to include in my praise Fraser’s late-in-life memoir ‘Light’s on at Signpost’. Alas, I can’t. The book’s almost impenetrably allusive title (it’s to do with a little-known feature of the TT motorcycle races in the Isle of Man, where Fraser went to live) is one of many features of it that I didn’t like. Another is the insider-gossip from various film-sets, which is fun if you like that sort of thing, and not if you don’t. I don’t.  In fact, I wrote a critical review of it for UPI, which I shall see if I can unearth. I also never got on with his ‘McAuslan’ stories, and, whle I enjoyed ‘Mr American’ and ‘Black Ajax’, neither of them seemed to me to be anywhere near the best of the Flashman books.

 

And of course these, too, vary.

 

The first five will, I think, endure for many years as near-classics of historical fiction, which also happen to be very funny. P.G. Wodehouse personally endorsed them when they began to come out, more than 40 years ago.

 

I still remember my first encounter with them, as an indentured apprentice living in a bedsit in Swindon, and being lifted out of the commonplace drudgery and disillusion of daily life in that most provincial of provincial towns. I’ve re-read many of them since, but one by one, on various long journeys where I knew for certain they’d keep me from tedium as the plane ground slowly through the night.

 

But a few weeks ago I thought I’d have a sustained go at them, not being in the mood for anything new or difficult.

For those who haven’t yet read them, I absolutely stand by my recommendation. Everyone should read these. I should say here that I seldom meet women who enjoy them, any more than I meet men who like Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall sequence, which, to me, is akin to being made to eat cold wallpaper paste without any kind of seasoning. This is particularly odd since I very much like Miss Mantel’s earlier, shorter books ‘A Change of Climate’ and ‘Eight Months on Ghazzah Street’  (the latter is tremendous, and a very rare fictional portrayal of Saudi Arabia). Mind you, I had to give up her sprawling tome about the French Revolution ‘A Place of Greater Safety’, which seemed to be a love-letter to (of all people) Camille Desmoulins, and in which, as far as I can recall, nothing ever happened.  Maybe it happened in the bit after I gave up. Then again, maybe not. As I am very interested in the French Revolution, it was quite an achievement to drive me away.

 

But I digress.

 

I am of that generation which did still actually read books such as ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’. We even had the ‘Boy’s Own Paper, which persisted well into my childhood and was composed of quarto pages of dense black print. I have tried to re-read ‘Tom Brown’ since but could not do so. I can only conclude that I must have skipped a lot of the early stuff or ‘read it’ by doggedly processing the words and pages while taking none of them in, for the opening chapters raise no memories in me at all. I certainly got on to the torture of the fags by Flashman the bully, and rejoiced at his downfall. I now realise that as a child I read surprisingly little fiction, much preferring to bury myself in the dense, cosy pages of Arthur Mee’s ‘Children’s Encyclopaedia’ , or his earlier’ ‘Children’s Treasure House’, steeped in Edwardian security,  or old volumes of ‘Punch’, from which I obtained the sepia-tinged, steam-powered, dreadnought-patrolled view of the world which was to be so thoroughly shattered in the era of the two Harolds, Macmillan and Wilson.

 

So I could never have been fooled (as ten American reviewers actually were when the first book came out) in to thinking that this was a genuine collection of the memoirs of an actual person.

 

It was just a brilliant conceit, to take Flashman as a foul, cruel, cowardly adolescent, at the moment of his shameful expulsion from Rugby by the great Dr Arnold, and imagine his later life in Queen Victoria’s world.  After all, Thomas Hughes had put the real Dr Arnold, and the real Rugby school,  in his fictional account of ‘Tom Brown’.

 

 I realised when I read Keith Waterhouse’s ‘Billy Liar’ that my boyhood habit of imagining and populating an alternative world, preferable to the real one, was not mine alone. I was always very grateful to Keith Waterhouse for that, and for many other inspirations. But Fraser’s creation of Flashman was far superior to that. It was a complete map of the Victorian world, into which any reader might enter and be enchanted. Perhaps the double perfection of this was to take the fictional Harry Flashman into Anthony Hope’s equally fictional  but entirely glorious thriller ‘The Prisoner of Zenda’ (origin of the word ‘Ruritania’) . And then, in tying this clever double-knot of fantasy, to use this device to put Flashman in the midst of the Schleswig-Holstein question of which Lord Palmerston famously said only three people had ever understood (‘One has gone mad, the other has died, and I have forgotten’). And in the midst of this we encounter both the young Karl Marx (at a distance) and Otto von Bismarck (very close to).

 

By making him a soldier, he could place him repeatedly at the heart of events about which we all think we know everything, but in fact know next to nothing. The detailed, well-researched truth about historical events is often absolutely astonishing. Fraser obviously longed to tell it, and, by putting it in the mouth of a fornicating, treacherous, drunken coward who has somehow survived undiscovered but, at the end of his life, doesn’t care if his descendants (his son is a Bishop) come to know the truth about him, did so in a way that would make hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, see these events as if they had been there. The books, I should add, are meticulously and wittily footnoted, with genuine references to proper factual accounts, which sometimes cast doubt on Flashman’s own memory. Oh and Fraser, like me a supporter of customary English weights and measures, is careful to use pounds and stones, yards, feet and inches, pints and gallons, and (that handy but oft-forgotten measure, unless you go horseracing) the furlong - very useful in describing cavalry actions. For those poor folk trapped in metric ignorance, a 'kilometre' is an ugly, unpoetic way way of describing five furlongs. Note that it takes an extra syllable to do so.

 

Most of what I know about the First Afghan war, the Sikh Wars, the Indian Mutiny, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Taiping Rebellion, and Otto von Bismarck, I owe to Fraser’s Flashman.

 

Some of his descriptive passages – the loading of broken-hearted slaves into the ships that would carry them away to misery, the horror of pursuit by slave-catchers, the poignant departure of the ‘Forty-Niners’ on their perilous journey to the California gold rush, the siege of Cawnpore, the day of Balaclava, the wrecking of the Summer Palace at Peking, the Indian camp just before little Big Horn, the retreat from Kabul, and several moments of terrifying, evil treachery, whose victims only slowly realise that they are doomed to die (he seems to have a special interest in this) have the power to conjure tears or send shivers not just up and down the spine but into the heart.

 

Once or twice he turns aside to reminisce from the point of view of a very old man who has seen most of those he knew go off, as he puts it, into the dark (where he will soon be going himself). This conveys a very powerful sense of the past as both a living thing, and as something irrecoverably lost, which can bring a lump to most throats.  There are one or two considerable surprises, such as his genuine grief at the death of ‘Scud’ East, whom he tortured at Rugby School, and whose manly, clean-limbed Christianity he cordially despises. There are two moments in the books where Flashman candidly reveals himself to former Rugby schoolfellows as a brothel-going, adulterous, fornicating pagan. He takes pleasure in the shock, and in the open sneering challenge he makes to their Christianity. He often condemns Christianity, quite explicitly, hating it as a truly selfish and worldly man, fully-developed and unrestrained, is bound to do. I have never been entirely sure how much of this was also Fraser’s view. He was of the generation which had lost their piety thanks to two great wars. I can’t recall him writing about it in his memoirs.

 

There’s a lot of sex, but cleverly described by allusion and euphemism, rather than in the bizarre anatomical detail favoured by so many modern authors. Flashy is clearly foul-mouthed, but his profanities are cleverly toned down by fictional ‘editors’, including a prissy sister-in-law, who plainly doesn’t understand most of the sexual allusions, and so leaves them untouched,  but carefully removed the word ‘damn’ where it occurs.

 

I do find, on re-reading, that the repeated use of the n-word (though entirely justified by time, context and the loathsome character of Harry Flashman himself) , is much more obtrusive than it was when the books were first published. I suppose it ought to be. Perhaps future editions could asterisk it, in recognition of that change.

 

For one of the things I found when I re-read them was that this usage did actually date them. It is a problem when you’re my age, to look back at the 1970s and 1980s, when I was young, tireless and unwise, and to realise how deep they have sunk into the past. So much so that they will quite soon be entombed in history, and my own recollections will be dismissed in favour of whatever some Oxbridge whippersnapper and BBC favourite will by then have decided what actually happened, what mattered and what didn’t.

 

The mere act of reading them again takes me back into that age, when many people, important in my life, were alive who are now dead, buildings standing which are now demolished, roads open which are now closed,  institutions, even countries,still in being which are now eviscerated or destroyed.

 

But that shouldn’t put the new reader off. The books are not outdated in style, are written so beautifully that most readers won’t notice the immense hard work that has gone into making them flow (thus fulfilling the old Hemingway rule that ‘It reads easy because it was writ hard’).  Fraser was, for most of his life, a journalist by trade and knew what to leave out. But he also had that unfathomable gift, impossible to analyse or synthesise, that of the born storyteller. Is there any other kind? I think it begins with a deep love of the story you want to tell.

Nor should anyone be bothered by the increasing problem which Fraser had, that Flashman is not really the poltroon he claims to be. He cannot be, or the stories wouldn't work.  On several notable occasions, he actually behaves quite courageously (that is to say, in his position I should certainly have run away rather than do what he does). He’s even a cricketer, a game he is said to have adopted because he was scared of Rugby Football. Well, I have always found cricket a good deal more frightening than rugby, having been introduced to it in the days before face guards and hard hats. In rugby, you can at least run away from the enemy, and, if you run fast enough while holding the ball, you may even get applauded for it (or so I found). The first two or three times you read the stories, you won’t notice this problem. When you do, you’ll wonder at how long it took you to notice.

 

He has some marvellous villains – the Russian intriguer and sadistic megalomaniac, Count Ignatieff is one. The slave-ship captain and Latin scholar John Charity Spring ( his ship is called the ‘Balliol College’, and I’ll leave you to find out why) is another. And he (Flashman, that is)  has a real-life loathing for Lord Cardigan (whose appearance in Flashman’s marital bedroom is one of the best comic passages ever written in English, and for Benjamin Disraeli (Flashman, unsurprisingly, is a Judophobe on top of all his other unrestrained vices). Though he has a great admiration for Abraham Lincoln, who, in a telling scene, lets Flashman know that he has seen straight through him. Only one other historical figure, the great Sir Colin Campbell, is credited with the same perspicacity.

 

Look, the best thing you can do is begin. The first book ‘simply called ‘Flashman’(set in Afghanistan) is the essential starting point. You might as well stick to chronological order after that , ‘Royal Flash’ is the Schleswig-Holstein one; ‘Flash for Freedom’ (in my view the best of all) the one about slavery. ‘Flashman at the Charge’ takes him to the Crimea and then on to the shores of the Aral Sea (now almost vanished thanks to Soviet greed) and the banks of the Syr Daria river, where (many, many years after first reading this book) I later found myself, gasping with astonishment that I, a suburban Englishman, should have ventured so far from home. ‘Flashman in the Great Game’ plunges him into the Indian Mutiny.  After that, well, you’ll probably want to read the lot, but the only one of the later books that holds to the standards of the originals is ‘Flashman and the Dragon’ set in China at the time of the Taipings.  In it, he comes closer than in any of the other books  to being exposed as what he really is, and your marrow will be frozen by the way in which he averts disgrace. He’s also captured something of the simultaneous wonder, terror and beauty of China, which I found to be absolutely right when, long after I had read this book, I came to travel extensively there. I do not know if he got this from his marvellous imagination, or from direct experience (Lionel Davidson, for instance, never went to Tibet, yet I am told by those who have that his evocation of it in 'The Rose of Tibet' was superb). I just know that he somehow grasped the heart of the matter.