Reactions to the death of George MacDonald Fraser, author of the “Flashman” series of historical novels, have been trickling through the blogs.
It’s interesting to see that Henry, over at Crooked Timber, had trouble warming to the novels for pretty much the same reason I like them so much. The series, in case you haven’t had the pleasure, takes the contemptible bully Harry Flashman from the pages of Tom Brown’s School Days and throws him into the middle of just about every military conflict going on during the Victorian era. The books are tremendous fun to read, with enough real historical figures to fill Penn Station moving in and out of each story, but the pitch-black joke underlying the shooting and wenching is that Flashman himself is a coward and toady who manages, though sheer luck and cunning, to become a military hero and the toast of the British Empire.
Fraser bluntly gives Flashman a full set of the exact sort of prejudices a man in Flashman’s position would have had during the Victorian era, with an added layer of predatory opportunism. This is a big part of Henry’s problem with the books:
In the first of the books, Flashman gets turned down by a dancing girl called Narreeman. When he has the chance later, he rapes her in a quite matter-of-fact way, showing no particular compunctions or mixed feelings; he has his chance to get her alone, and he takes it. As Gaiman suggests, the later entries in the series soften Flashman’s character considerably. They depict him as a bully, a liar and a shit, but a conventional bully, liar and shit. The (I would imagine mostly male) readers of the book can enjoy his bad behaviour in these later books without having to think about it, or themselves, too much. But the rape scene in the first book breaks that illusion, making clear what the modern reader might prefer to forget; that men like Flashman in the nineteenth century wouldn’t have had many qualms at all about raping ‘native’ women.
As a result, the Flashman books have always creeped me out, even though I can recognize that they’re very well written. The author expects you to enjoy Flashman’s caddishness and identify with it, while quietly making it obvious that Flashman isn’t so much charmingly self-centered as he is an amoral and vicious thug. Which probably means that they’re better books in a sense (as Gaiman says, you learn things from books that present worldviews you disagree with, or even abominate), but also spoils the ‘fun,’ at least for me.
It’s true that the series took a turn for the worst after Flashman and the Dragon in 1985, and for pretty much the reason Gaiman suggests: Fraser defanged his own creation. What makes the best (i.e., early) books so exhilarating is Fraser’s readiness to yank the chair out from under his readers just as they’re starting to snuggle up to the idea of Flashman as nothing worse than a charming rogue. The rape of Narreeman is small potatoes compared to the fate suffered by Cleonie, the whore Flashman sells into captivity in Flashman and the Redskins, or Nolan, the trooper who tries to blackmail our hero in Flashman and the Dragon and gets a fatal lesson in low cunning. In those books, Flash Harry trafficks in reptilian evil, and Fraser rubs our noses in it. The betrayal of Cleonie also gives him a chance to introduce a real honey of a plot twist about two-thirds of the way through Flashman and the Redskins.
Fraser is at his best during an extended sequence in Flash for Freedom in which Harry, having assumed a false identity and signed on as a plantation overseer (during which he takes full advantage of the opportunities for sexual exploitation), is caught tupping the owner’s wife and is punished by being made a slave himself. (This is entirely believable under the circumstances.) He is befriended by a slave woman whose bottomless well of rage against all whites brings home the full human horror of slavery, and leads to a bravura escape, with the two just barely keeping ahead of pursuit, Harry plotting all the while to save his own neck all the while, climaxing with a chase across the Ohio River that Fraser, with typical cheek, blithely claims was the inspiration for a similar scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. That the whole thing ends with Flashman, despite his worst intentions, being celebrated as the woman’s savior makes the joke all the better.
Running through the news items on Fraser’s death, I came across this Geoffrey Wheatcroft column from 2005 that reassured me that Fraser, while a mossbacked Tory to the end, was still at bottom a sane man:
One of the most electrifying moments in the past month wasn’t directly related to the election. George MacDonald Fraser was talking on the Today programme about the latest of his marvellous Flashman novels. Now an octogenarian, a Tory of Tories, this splendid writer is for ever groaning about the dismal modern age and every woe from political correctness to the metric system. More relevantly, a lifetime earlier he was an infantryman, who saw his best friend killed beside him.
Suddenly there was an explosion on air. He had never in his life felt more ashamed of his country than he had over Iraq, the old soldier said. He could not get out of his head two pictures, one of a small Iraqi boy with his arms blown off by American bombs, and another of our prime minister smirking sycophantically at President Bush’s side.
Watching the falling-upward career of George W. Bush, in which failure, malfeasance and corruption led him all the way to a hijacked presidential election and a poisonous presidency, I’m sure Fraser thought of Flashman more than once.
