No more Flashman, ever

I was saddened to hear of the death of George MacDonald Fraser yesterday at the age of 82. I've been a huge fan of his work since encountering his Flashman, the first of a series of "memoirs" of the fictional villain from Tom Brown's Schooldays:

MacDonald Fraser served as a soldier in Burma and India during World War II and later rose to be deputy editor of the Glasgow Herald newspaper.

He was still working there when the first Flashman book was published in 1969.

A further 11 followed, the last in 2005.

The inspiration for Sir Harry Flashman came from the 19th century novel, Tom Brown's Schooldays, where the character features as the cowardly bully who torments the hero, Tom.

MacDonald Fraser based his tales on the idea that Flashman's "memoirs" had been unearthed in an old trunk in a Leicestershire auction room.

Despite being a vain, cowardly rogue, as well as a racist and a sexist, the character managed to play a pivotal role in many of the 19th Century's most significant events, always emerging covered in glory.

If you've never read any of the Flashman series, do yourself a favour and pick up the original . . . if you have any taste for history at all, I think you'll be hooked.

John Sutherland wrote:

One sure way to determining true Britishness in a work of fiction is to see whether or not it joins the Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, never making it across to the other side. [. . .]

With Flashman, Americans didn't understand the inverted Victorianism that was Fraser's gimmick. Instead of Thomas Hughes's prig Tom Brown (he of the Schooldays) Fraser chronicled the British empire through the dandy-cad who roasts young Tom over the dormitory fire and is, to the relief of decent Rugbeians, expelled by the fearsome Dr Arnold (the most eminent of Lytton Strachey's eminent Victorians) for drunkenness and hanky panky with the barmaid at the local pub.

Fraser was intending amusing travesty, but, underneath it all, the author really believed in Britishness. When the chips are down (when sepoys, for example, are murdering women and children in the Indian Mutiny) Flashman is a gallant and decent fellow (and no racist). Flashy, not unflashy Tom, embodies what made the empire work.

The Flashman novels spoke eloquently to the British reader. They articulated that mixture of cynicism, shame, and pride that contemporary Britons felt about Victorian values and Great Britain.

America just didn't get it. As Fraser recalled in an interview; "when Flashman appeared in the US in 1969, one-third of 40-odd critics accepted it as a genuine historical memoir. 'The most important discovery since the Boswell Papers,' is the one that haunts me still . . . I was appalled . . . I'd never supposed that it would fool anybody."

Update, 8 January: Major General Flea has been kind enough to link to this post, and to offer in return a link to Fraser's final article in the Daily Mail:

When 30 years ago I resurrected Flashman, the bully in Thomas Hughes's Victorian novel Tom Brown's Schooldays, political correctness hadn't been heard of, and no exception was taken to my adopted hero's character, behaviour, attitude to women and subject races (indeed, any races, including his own) and general awfulness.

On the contrary, it soon became evident that these were his main attractions. He was politically incorrect with a vengeance.

Through the Seventies and Eighties I led him on his disgraceful way, toadying, lying, cheating, running away, treating women as chattels, abusing inferiors of all colours, with only one redeeming virtue — the unsparing honesty with which he admitted to his faults, and even gloried in them.

And no one minded, or if they did, they didn't tell me. In all the many thousands of readers' letters I received, not one objected.

In the Nineties, a change began to take place. Reviewers and interviewers started describing Flashman (and me) as politically incorrect, which we are, though by no means in the same way.

This is fine by me. Flashman is my bread and butter, and if he wasn't an elitist, racist, sexist swine, I'd be selling bootlaces at street corners instead of being a successful popular writer.

But what I notice with amusement is that many commentators now draw attention to Flashy's (and my) political incorrectness in order to make a point of distancing themselves from it.

Do, as they say, read the whole thing.