| This was, after all, the man who introduced me and thousands of readers to the Victorian song 'Drink Puppy Drink', who created Sir Harry Flashman, and whose version of history was a subversive, subaltern and hilarious perspective on Empire. |
| The first volume of the Flashman Papers came out in 1969, "after the discovery of Sir Harry Flashman's memoirs hidden in a trunk during a sale of household furniture at Ashby de la Zouch, Leicestershire, in 1965". |
| Some credulous souls believed George Macdonald Fraser's tongue-in-cheek claim that he was merely the researcher. But many remembered Thomas Hughes' sanctimonious, if once wildly popular, Victorian novel, Tom Brown's Schooldays, where the most interesting character was Flashman. "Flashey" was a coward, sneak and bully who was thrown out of Rugby for becoming "beastly drunk". |
| "He played well at all games where pluck wasn't much wanted," Hughes wrote of Flashman, "...and having a bluff, off-hand manner, which passed for heartiness, and considerable powers of being pleasant when he liked, went down with the school in general for a good fellow enough." |
| Fraser discovered the joys of Rafael Sabatini and historical fiction as a young boy and called himself "a sort of history alcoholic". In the Flashman books, he is fascinated by the question of what really started the Charge of the Light Brigade (his explanation, a farting cavalry officer, was not intended to be taken seriously), what lay behind Rani Lakshmibai's role in 1857, or the true story behind Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King. Thomas Hughes' Flashman gave him the anti-hero he needed, a lecherous bully and coward whose charm took him romping, Zelig-like, through the Crimea, Afghanistan , Balaclava, the Mutiny, the American Civil War and a score of other events of historical import. |
| Fraser was an unabashed opponent of political correctness, as one might expect from the creator of a "hero" who cheated at billiards, blubbed when faced with the prospect of torture and whose chief recreation was dancing the mattress quadrille, often laying enough cane, as Flashy puts it, to build a banister around Hyde Park. (Flashman had bedded 478 women by Volume 9 of the Papers, including Lillie Langtry, Lola Montez, Ranavalona I, Queen of Madagascar, an Apache princess and Maharani Jeendan. He counted among his few natural talents a gift for horsemanship, languages, cricket and fornication.) |
| What makes the books work, in our stiffly politically correct times, is that Sir Harry Flashman is a strangely compelling rogue, and George Macdonald Fraser was a brilliant historian. The notes at the end of each set of Papers often contained fascinating information on the Underground Railroad, the Second Opium War, Lord Cardigan, the Retreat from Kabul, the Forty-Niners, etc. Flashman is morally repugnant (he commits rape in the first book), vicious, duplicitous, cowardly "" and unabashedly honest about his life and times as a low-down cad. In other words, he's the perfect hero for the 21st century. |
| Fraser wrote several other books, and many of his fans have a soft spot for the semi-autobiographical "McAuslan" series, featuring the travails of the Dirtiest Soldier in the World, as well as for the slightly old-fashioned but very moving, Mr American. The autobiographical Quartered Safe Out Here remains one of the best honest accounts of the forgotten war in Burma, where Fraser served in the 17th Black Cat Division. But he will be remembered chiefly for transforming an unpleasant Victorian schoolboy into one of the most unforgettable rogues in literary history. |
| From Flashman and the Dragon: "So often it's like that, when the most vivid chapters end. In a moment you're at peace and dog-tired, with your back to a gun-wheel at Gwalior, or closing your eyes in a corner seat of the Deadwood Stage, or drinking tea contentedly with an old Khirghiz bandit in a serai on the Golden Road, or sitting alone with the President of the United States at the end of a great war, listening to him softly whistling 'Dixie'." Goodbye, Sir Harry. And thank you, Mr Fraser. Disclaimer: The columnist is Chief Editor, Westland/ EastWest Books. These are her personal views |
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