Not for the pearl clutching classes….

In 1969 George MacDonald Fraser, a journalist on the Glasgow Herald, published his first novel, Flashman. His idea was inspired. He took a character from a popular 19^th century book about life in an English public school, Tom Brown’s School Days, and followed his subsequent life and career. The character was Harry Flashman, the seventeen year old cowardly bully at Rugby School, who in the original book, is expelled for drunkenness. So, he has a young man, from a good, but not quite top draw family, expelled in disgrace in 1839, at the dawn of the Victorian age. There was really only one place to put him, in the army.

A commission in the 11^th Light Dragoons is arranged for the young Harry Flashman and in twelve books MacDonald Fraser weaves him, with breath taking skill, into numerous historical episodes from the 1840s to the 1890s. Lieutenant Harry Paget Flashman ends up as the venerable Sir Harry Paget Flashman, VC, KCB, KCIE. He experiences, albeit with great reluctance, such iconic events as the disastrous retreat from Kabul, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the raid on Harper’s Ferry, the Indian Mutiny and the Little Big Horn. On the way he meets famous and fascinating 19^th century figures like Bismarck, Lincoln, Gordon of Khartoum, Lola Montez and Kit Carson.

The novels are comic, historical adventures. If ever a series of books deserved to be described as romps it is the Flashman books. Flashman is certainly an anti-hero, a coward, liar and womaniser he always manages to save his skin and come out of numerous adventures with his reputation enhanced and his skin (mostly) whole by a mix of luck and judgment. This does not sound like a promising lead character but there is a great deal of charm in the honesty and humour with which he narrates his own adventures.

They are also phenomenally un-PC. I think there are people at Berkeley today who might just have a stroke if they were to read a Flashman novel. Of course, a white chap, a British officer, fighting and fornicating his way through the British Empire, the USA and other exotic locations is unlikely to appeal to the perpetually offended. The N word is used on a fair few occasions and about more or less any non-European darker than him, as Flashman’s real life equivalents did do. Flashman is not exactly a Beta male/new man in his relations with women either, in every book he has amorous encounters with more than one woman and his appraisal of his companions is frank in the extreme. You don’t need to be from the pearl clutching classes to sometimes give a little gasp when reading Flashman. He sometimes commits acts that shock, especially in the earlier books.

You won’t be surprised to learn that George MacDonald Fraser was no lefty. He had a fine contempt for government in general and no time for political correctness or socialism. He was, in his later years (he died in 2008) a consummate curmudgeonly old sod. In his twenties he fought with the Border Regiment in Burma in the Second World War and after the war served as a junior officer in the Gordon Highlanders in North Africa and the Middle East (his memoirs of his time in Burma, Quartered Safe Out Here, are also well worth a read). He was a man who had seen life, and death, he’d known people from all walks of life and had a healthy respect for them, and this comes across in the Flashman stories.

For all the un-PC bravado of the books they are not, emphatically not, racist or sexist. MacDonald Fraser was too worldly wise to fall for the idea that one human is better than another because of their sex or because of their race. Flashman does some despicable things in order to survive, and sometimes out of spite, but he is no white superman bestriding women and natives. In more than one of Flashman’s hair raising adventures it is thinking with an organ other than his brain that lands him in trouble to start with. Many of the women he encounters are more than a match for him, not least his beloved wife Elspeth, who he meets and marries in the first book, and who he is oddly faithful to (not physically of course) over more than fifty years of marriage.

Flashman encounters Sikhs, Afghans, Americans of African and European descent, Malays, Germans, Apaches, Zulus, Sioux, Russians, Uzbeks, Chinese, Ethiopians, Madagascans and even Frenchmen. He may describe people in 19^th century language but don’t be fooled, he deals with people as people. A coward himself he recognises and respects courage in others and gives that respect to allies and opponents of all colours and creeds. His adventures often involve him living among people of different races for some time and even living as someone of a different race. In Flashman and the Great Game he spends months as Makarram Khan, a Hasanzai Afghan of the Black Mountain. In Flashman’s Lady he is sold as a slave in Madagascar. Despite the unapologetically entertaining nature of the books they often contain nuanced reflections on the nature of how humanity divides itself up.

MacDonald Fraser had great respect and affection for America and Americans and sets three of the books – Flash For Freedom!, Flashman and the Redskins and Flashman and the Angel of the Lord – in, or largely in, the USA. Flashman gets involved in many adventures and meets John Brown, Lincoln, Custer, Mangas Colorado, Ulysses S Grant, Spotted Tail and Wild Bill Hickok and finds himself in Deadwood, Santa Fe, on the Mississippi and the streets of Washington DC. There are four distinct stories, Flashman and Redskins being in two separate but interlinked parts, and fictional though they are, you can learn a lot about 19^th century America.

This brings me to what, for me, is the greatest and most defining quality of the Flashman books, the sheer historical input. The books rely on the well-used conceit that the modern author is editing actual historical memoirs. MacDonald Fraser researched his books thoroughly and you can trust his history, where he does take liberties, he lets his reader know, but without popping the bubble of the story. Each novel has a good many notes at the end, often a significant portion of the book. The notes are entertaining as well as informative, telling of small social details as much as great affairs of state. Having done the research MacDonald Fraser then adds Flashman and stirs. The resulting stew of history, adventure and comedy is satisfying and nourishing.

Sadly, there is a downside. The great care with which the books were written means that from 1969 to 2005 MacDonald Fraser wrote only twelve of them. In total there are just 4,002 pages of Flashy goodness to gorge on. Even more frustratingly the books mention adventures yet unwritten. By his own admission Flashman serves in the American Civil War with both the Union and Confederacy, he takes part in the Sudan Campaign of 1884-5, the Ballarat gold rush in Australia and the later stages of the Mexican Adventure.

So, if you want a change from the often cloying, toxic, bitter cultural food on offer in the 21^st century Anglosphere I heartily recommend a diet of Flashman.

The books were not written in chronological order and don’t need to be read in order, however, I would suggest starting with the first book, Flashman. After that they can be read as you think fit. I hope you enjoy them.