Flash Harry

Flashman’s world of women and running away

Flashman, Royal Flash, Flash for Freedom!, Flashman at the Charge, Flashman in the Great Game, Flashman's Lady, Flashman and the Redskins, Flashman and the Dragon, Flashman and the Mountain of Light, Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, Flashman and the Tiger, Flashman on the March by George MacDonald Fraser

Harry Flashman is a cad. Harry Flashman is a bounder. Harry Flashman is a coward. But that is not what the world believes of Harry Flashman, nor is it what Flashman wants the world to know of him. Hence the contradictions and contrivances of George MacDonald Fraser’s excellent books: the difference between reality and image. The fakeness of greatness. The deceit at the heart of all public men.

Thrown out of Rugby for being, as Tom Brown’s School Days tells us, ‘beastly drunk’, Flashman is told by his father — a ruined, whoremongering drunkard like himself — that there is no money and he must get an honest living. Flashman pitches up in the cavalry, and because of his fine bearing, athletic physique and appearance of sang froid, he is considered a natural soldier, despite his lack of interest in really facing danger, in really doing anything except indulging his many vices, the most obvious and amusing of them being the pursuit of all women, except the ugly ones. And lucky for Flash Harry, he appears to have a way with the pretty ones, even the craziest among them, at least for a little while.

Over this series of books, all novels save a single collection of short stories, Flashman finds himself increasingly garlanded and promoted, sent to the most important places in the world and the nastiest conflicts raging throughout the nineteenth century. He is often at the sharp end simply because he looks the part, and because he has been there before and no one who saw him flee or cower or simper and deceive lived to tell the tale. We have Flashman in Afghanistan, at the remarkable British reversal and defeat. We have Flashman against the Zulus. Flashman spends much of his time in India — surviving remarkably during the Mutiny. We see Flashman in Mexico and America, doing yeoman’s work despite desiring nothing less than to disappear with some loot and the most enticing of the women around, never to do a good deed again in his pale-faced life.

He cannot do wrong for doing right. It is quite a peculiar thing.

Flashman has some traits that serve him well but which serve his contemporaries very badly. He is tall and superficially muscular. He is able, because he does not care to speak, to affect the mannerisms of the bluff soldier, the man of affairs who knows more than he says and cannot abide the foolishness of the world’s namby-pambies and ponces. Flashman has a habit, when he is deathly afraid (which is often) of going bright red in the face — which everyone else, friend or foe, instead believes is a sign of rage. This serves him well. And he is, despite himself, a hair shot with most firearms, able to pick up foreign languages very easily, and thus good at disguising himself when necessary.

This sad fact means that Flashman is all too often sent somewhere quite dreadful under orders: told to do intelligence work as a ‘political’, be it infiltrating a Rani’s court in mutinous India or to travel into the dark heights of Afghanistan without assistance or support. Flashman is unhappy to do this, but he has not choice. He very rarely has a choice at all.

He is Sherlock Holmes, with much the same intellect, although in Flashman’s case that intellect is scheming. Yet none of the heart or the bravery. Holmes risks his life for his own intellectual pleasure. Flashman does so only by mistake or under duress.

All lies, all is lying. And yet. What one often finds when Flashman encounters a historical figure is that they really are who they are said to have been. Sometimes to a fault. Abraham Lincoln is said when Flashman encounters him to have a strong and manly voice. We know, or think we know, from the reports of Lincoln’s contemporaries that his voice was actually somewhat high and reedy, and despite the beauty and concision of the Gettysburg Address, for instance, Lincoln often told endless folksy stories and long jokes which only meanderingly arrived at their destination and their punchlines.

But other historical characters described by Fraser and Flashy accord with what we believe of them. Tom Brown, the celebrated Tom Brown, is in adult life a strong man both morally and physically. He is the true Victorian Christian gentleman he was described as, a worthy scion of the house Brown as described by Thomas Hughes. And there are gentlemen boxers and fair cricketers whom even Flashy cannot deprecate. He finds one or two strong-minded political types, some of them quite junior, who have a hint of steel about them and a quiet way. Many of those men have only one weakness: their inability, even when evidence seems to stare them in the face, to detect that Flashman himself is not as he appears to be.

Palmerston, our prime minister, is a tough old bird. Known as Pam, he is a little vulgar in speech but he is a bull of a man, clever as anything. Other men Flashman encounters, including many of the British generals, are not — or are at least not all — the fools of other satirical fiction, but are instead remarkably brave, some even suicidally so, or they are men well cultivated, or men who have an engineer’s mind, or men who have ambitions and hopes and mean to carry them out.

What Flashman believes is that worldly ambition is foolish, because pursing ambition always ends badly. He sees political intriguers shot and drowned and fed to wild animals. He sees mutineers blown to pieces by cannons — either on the battlefield or because they have been caught and strapped to the cannon’s mouth. For Flashman, anything other than temporary pleasures are not worth it. Those who    desire more will always come to grief in the end.

One little irony pervades the novels. As Flashman travels the world he beds an impossible number of women. Some of them historical figures, or figures who will later become historic. In Flashman and the Dragon, a wonderful book, he encounters Orchid, the Noble Consort Yi, who would later grow up to become the Dowager Empress Cixi. (One of the most remarkable scenes in the series comes when the Imperial Summer Palace, where Flashman was previously imprisoned, is wrecked and ruined by the army under the command of Lord Elgin.) But the greatest mystery of the books is whether, during all of his unwilling times spent away, Flashman’s wife Elspeth (considered by him a brainless object, good looking but liable to prattle on saying absolutely nothing of worth) is being unfaithful to him in recompense. This is only a mystery to Flashman, as the reader knows very well that she is being, and absolutely constantly, with everyone. But Flashman says himself that he never has found proof, though he keeps looking for it, and after all, their reunions always seem so affectionate.

Flashman as cuckold. Flashman as almost a George Smiley figure: superficially accomplished, with a beautiful wife, but unsure of whether he can keep her. She has the money, after all. She has all the social position. It’s ironies like that which make the books more than triumphal slogs of sex and quite shocking violence. It’s ironies like this that make Fraser’s books more than childish romps. They are beautifully written mostly, and funnier than most comedies. And the have a lot of post-modern touches I enjoy, including the introductions and the notes — based on decent sources — which maintain the fiction that Flashman is the true author of the work, these being his private papers, discovered by Fraser in a tea chest in the 1960s, and only lightly edited by their author, who serves only to assist as editor the printing of the distinguished military man’s diaries, which are more disarmingly honest than his earlier memoirs, the three volumes of Dawns and Departures of a Soldier’s Life.

Some critics decided that when Flashman first appeared, Fraser was a vital satiric voice aimed at the shades of the Victorians: that he saw through their lies and their dishonesties, their false piety and their invention of tradition. (A few people thought the book was real, that Flashman was real, and treated it as though it were serious new primary source work: a book illuminating the past in strange and unexpected ways.)

But Fraser did not write Flashman’s life to put a bullet into the Victorians. He read their histories and found a nation whose men travelled the world, often ill-equipped, often without support, often with less humility than may have been wise. A race of men who made the world in their image, even though it all fell apart after they were dead. He found them interesting. That’s why he gave them new life.