Am I going soft? I no longer like the Flashman books of George MacDonald Fraser anything like as much as I once did. I discovered them in my early twenties, when, to misquote G. K. Chesterton, I was angry and poor and unhappy, training to be a newspaper reporter and living in a sad, very brown bedsitting room in the unpicturesque town of Swindon. I had found this cheap, unappealing but unsupervised refuge from the weather soon after rejecting other lodgings. There, the landlady looked narrowly at me and proclaimed “You’ll be safe from the devil in here.” I was not, at that stage in my life, as impressed by this guarantee as I should have been. I gazed upon the candlewick bedspread, the black iron bed frame, and the uplifting pictures on the walls, and, through the narrow window, at the prospect of slate roofs going on forever. I looked at my would-be landlady, who looked back at me with what I thought was a good deal of justified suspicion. And I decided that I did not in fact wish to be safe from the devil, in whom I then did not believe, more fool me. You may by now be feeling sorry for poor old Swindon, but you should not bother. Even its proudest residents will admit that it is not exactly Paris.
My days were spent on the press bench in the magistrates court, which I was sternly taught did not have an apostrophe. Or I might have interviewed (for example) a man who had killed a rat in his publicly owned home, using a shovel. He had preserved the corpse as evidence, since the authorities denied that any such creatures were to be found in their well-run estates. I can still see him, holding the flattened rodent up by its tail for the benefit of the photographer who had gone with me on this mission. My evenings were often spent at parish councils or similar committees, where I must have missed many important stories by having more or less lost consciousness. My Friday afternoons were spent under the strict supervision of a demanding primary school teacher of the proper sort. She drilled me and my fellow trainees in a whole new alphabet, the severe and demanding lines, dots, curves, and squiggles of Pitman’s shorthand. To this day I admire this small woman’s ability to command a room full of hulking graduates who had thought they had long ago put this sort of thing behind them. As for Sir Isaac Pitman’s ingenious writing system, I am strangely pleased to discover that, as with so many other things, I am one of the last alive that knows it. It has been driven out of use, either by less demanding alphabets or by the ease with which everything can now be recorded electronically. All the time, I struggled to read back my Pitman’s outlines. I still do, sometimes staring at the page and puzzling for long minutes over what I can possibly have meant by that. This life was intended to be an apprenticeship, leading on to better things. But what if it turned out to be my actual fate? It was not at all what I had dreamed of when I decided to be a journalist. I frequently wondered if I was being subtly punished for something I had done or was going to do.
I had no T.V. set and could not afford to spend much time in pubs, and so was compelled to read and read and read, for it was the easiest, cheapest and fastest escape from Swindon. And one of my chief solaces was the Flashman series, then still young. It blazed with color and humor, it was intelligent and undeceived and knowing. Having once begun on it, I longed for the next volume. In the intervals of waiting, I returned to the earlier books and found more in them than I had at first seen. Its first episode had been published in 1969, and I think I must first have heard of it in the summer of 1973. By then it was, I think, becoming a substantial cult.
These stories were supposedly the adult adventures of Harry Flashman, who in those days many people still recalled as the appalling bully in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days. Does anyone still read this nineteenth-century best-seller? Probably not. Do many people still even know the outlines of it? Less and less so, I suspect. Fraser’s brilliant conceit was too clever for some early reviewers, who genuinely thought the first book really was (as its text claimed) the rediscovered private papers of a Victorian soldier. Obviously, I knew this was not so. This added to the vast joke, and the secret feeling of superiority over the uninitiated, that the readers of cult books regrettably develop (What? Haven’t you read Flashman?!)
Long after I left my brown bedsitting room and those gray streets, and long after I had begun to seek safety from the devil, I still read them. They were a continued solace and joy. Faced with a long air journey, or struck down by some snuffling illness, or just cradled in the brief peace of Christmas, I would reach one of them down from the shelf, and begin again on the journey to Afghanistan, or Balaclava, or Calcutta, or New Orleans, or Canton, turning frequently to Fraser’s cunning footnotes which revealed that many of the most unbelievable events described there had actually happened and are history. I visited, in those pages, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Indian Mutiny (as we then still called it), Russia’s merciless conquest of Central Asia, the heartbreaking destruction of the Peking Summer Palace. and the United States on the eve of the Civil War. In one, perhaps the best, Fraser combined the Schleswig-Holstein crisis (of which Lord Palmerston famously said that three men understood it: One went mad. One is dead, and I have forgotten about it) with a much ruder version of Anthony Hope Hawkins’s still marvellous Victorian thriller The Prisoner of Zenda.
The pages of many of my old copies are soft with much turning. But lately I am not quite so sure about them. The central idea is that Flashman is a whimpering coward who looks angry when he is most afraid, and who manages to make and preserve a wholly fake reputation for valor. He is also a nasty trickster, who defrauds and humiliates those who help him, and who cheerfully abandons others to horrible fates. He is attractive to some women, who fall for him and are almost all betrayed by him. Some of them get the better of him in the end, but not all of them, especially an Afghan beauty who despises him on sight and whom he then thuggishly rapes. Yes, he actually does so. And he is a brilliant linguist who can fit in anywhere, even among Afghan tribesmen. Queens, especially fall for his charms. The Duke of Wellington probably suspects he is a fake. Abraham Lincoln (wonderfully portrayed) just knows he is a fraud, but being a bit of a fraud himself, takes it in good part and does not expose him.
That is all very well. But in Flashman and the Dragon, set during an Anglo-French invasion of China, an ordinary soldier discovers beyond doubt that Flashman is a coward and threatens to expose him. Skip this if you have not read the book, and might yet do so, but when both men are captured by Chinese troops, Flashman, with the evil cunning of a desperate sewer rat, tricks the soldier into volunteering for his own grisly death and sneers at him as he dies. Now, this is bad enough, but Fraser beguiles his readers (well, this one certainly) into being glad, even relieved, that Flashman has saved his bacon by encompassing the death of another human creature.
Fraser also inserts into his storytelling a few very telling moments of mockery of the Christian virtues. Two of these involve a character from the book Tom Brown’s School Days. I won’t spoil your enjoyment of Flashman at the Charge or Flashman in the Great Game to describe how the lecherous poltroon manipulates and deceives one of his former school victims, “Scud” East. Flashman’s contempt for Christian piety and forgiveness seems to me to have rather more force to it than is strictly necessary. The gullible East, trapped with Flashman amid the siege of Cawnpore, pathetically seeks the brute’s forgiveness, when by rights it should be the other way round. Flashman dismisses East’s offer of restitution with an obscene suggestion, reveals the truth about his lechery, purely to shock and distress his fellow-soldier, and jeers lengthily at East’s belief in forgiveness. Not long afterwards, East (who unlike Flashman is genuinely brave and takes conscious risks in a good cause) dies in front of him.
Flashman, as sentimental as most cruel cynics are, finds himself blubbering like a child, while continuing to hate “the little bastard, too, for his smug, manly piety.” Reflecting later on his long, prosperous, bemedalled life of running away or hiding, combined with greed and selfishness, he reflects, “That’s why I’m eighty years old today, while Scud East has been mouldering underground at Cawnpore this forty-odd years.” He drives this contrast home, saying, “Yes, he was a fool then, and a fool twenty years later, when he died in the dust at Cawnpore with a Sepoy’s bayonet in his back. Honest Scud East: that was all that was all that his gallant goodness did for him.”
Well, all right. This is a truthful portrayal of Flashman’s actual character, a man full of crude prejudices who plays vicious tricks out of habit, who plainly enjoys hurting the women he can’t charm or who immediately see him for the monster he is. I have found few women who like the Flashman books all that much and I’m not very surprised, now that I come to think about it. But isn’t Fraser enjoying making this point about the wages of faith being an early, gruesome death a bit too much? At one point Fraser also contrives a confrontation between Flashman and the equally fictional Tom Brown (of the eponymous School Days), whom Flashman tortured as a child. Brown, like East, is inclined to forgive the past. Flashman responds by deliberately outraging him with talk of whorehouses and lust. There is also a clever passage in which he elaborately mocks the parable of the Prodigal Son, concluding that he never confuses religion with belief in God.
I have no idea what Fraser’s religious opinions were, but when he died there was a gathering in a decommissioned church which, I seem to recall, had no religious elements. He had been a real soldier himself, in the grueling Burma campaign, and his memoir Quartered Safe Out Here is a masterpiece of writing which everyone should read who wants to know what war is actually like. He had sensible views on the modern habit of sending men to die in foolish wars (he was against it). And Harry Flashman’s blithe imperialism and happy fornication were refreshing to many as the age of modern piety dawned, with its multitude of speech codes, and its long, disapproving faces. In fact, there is a slight parallel between the disapproving hypocrisy of both the Victorian age and our own. But, as I simple-mindedly enjoyed these stories, was I in fact strolling cheerfully on the broad path which leads to the eternal bonfire? I begin to think I might have been. For sure, the books have begun to lose their charm for me, and I see their faults more readily than I did when I first opened the first one.
