Flashman and the Angel of the Lord. - book reviews

National Review, July 10, 1995 by Anthony Lejeune

IT WAS a good idea in the beginning and has grown steadily richer. George MacDonald Fraser, a Scottish journalist, decided some thirty years ago to write his way out of the frustration caused by not being appointed editor of the Glasgow Herald; and the thought that struck him was to borrow Flashman, the handsome, bullying villain of that pious Victorian work Tom Brown's Schooldays, and follow his adult adventures, a colorful anti-hero much more interesting than the pallid Tom Brown.

Flashman himself would be the narrator: sardonic, lecherous, cowardly, and selfish, but quick-witted, resourceful, and, in these reminiscences, amusingly candid. The joke was, and ten volumes later is, that the more deplorably Flashman behaves and the more appalling the scrapes he gets into, the more brightly his reputation shines and his career blossoms, turning him into Sir Harry Flashman, VC, a happily married great-grandfather, honored by all. Ingloriously but covered in popular glory, he escapes from the Indian Mutiny, the Charge of the Light Brigade, Little Big Horn, and (in an episode not yet published) the Zulu massacre of British troops at Isandhlwana, as well as innumerable tight corners involving slavers, pirates, spies, rebel tribesmen, Chinese torturers, outraged husbands, and voracious ladies. In this latest volume, having imprudently succumbed to the dropped handkerchief of a married lady in a Calcutta hotel, Flashman slips away to South Africa, whence, lured by the daughter of an old enemy, he is shanghaied aboard a ship to Baltimore. No sooner has he been pitched, penniless, onto American soil than entanglements from his previous deceptions and illegalities south of the Mason - Dixon line are pulled tight around him, like a gladiator's net. He finds himself coerced into working simultaneously for the anti-slavery underground, forerunners of the Ku Klux Klan, the U.S. Government (through the agency, after a gunfight, of Allan Pinkerton), and, most alarmingly and intimately, the enigmatic visionary John Brown. This doom-fraught situation culminates in the raid on, and bloody recapture of, Harper's Ferry, which, with his usual last-minute good luck, Flashman survives -- to be commissioned, in still unwritten but adumbrated chapters, by both the Union and the Confederate armies. There are, as always, vivid, wry, credible portraits of historical figures; memorably of William Henry Seward, without whose diplomatic skills (``A masterpiece of flannel,'' Fraser calls it) Britain might have been provoked into full military support of the Confederacy, and in consequence the Civil War, (from the Union's point of view) lost. Fraser puts into his mouth a most eloquent argument for Anglo-American unity: ``We may have our rivalries and jealousies, all those tiresome jests and gibes about the top-lofty Briton and the brash Yankee, but let me tell you, sir, the smart travelers who publish their 'impressions' and disparage the 'differences' between us, see only the surfaces of our countries. Beneath, we are one people still. One language, one law, one thing, as our Norse ancestors would say . . .'' The argument is impressive still, as Flashy is persuaded -- not by the flannel but by consideration of how it might affect Queen Victoria and therefore damage his own prospects if he failed to help. The central portrait, though, is of John Brown himself, and it is again wholly credible. He was the kind of single-issue fanatic whom we know only too well, switching in a moment from ruthlessness to sentimentality, full of ``half-learned knowledge,'' equally capable of writing a sweet letter to his five-year-old granddaughter and of massacring opponents in cold blood. ``He wasn't a good speaker, but he had a presence, and the mere sight of the Covenanter figurehead, with its flashing eyes and rasping voice, was enough to set them stomping and rummaging in their purses. Once or twice he waxed philosophical, and came adrift . . . but when he came out thundering that whoever took up arms to defend slavery had 'a perfect right to be shot,' they raised the roof.'' Yes, we know the type. The Flashman series has won as much of a following -- a cult following maybe, but large -- in the United States as in Britain. Alfred Knopf said of the first book (and, being the shrewdest of publishers, meant it as a compliment) that he hadn't heard such a voice in fifty years. The tone is quite hard to convey to those who've never sampled it. What the Flashman books are not is farce or slapstick or (despite a bad film made from one of them) parody. Nor are they, as a left-wing critic suggested, satire aimed at Victorian hypocrisy and imperialism. ``The Victorians,'' Fraser sharply replied, ``were mere amateurs in hypocrisy compared to our brainwashed, sanctimonious, self-censoring, and terrified generation.'' These novels belong to an older tradition altogether: the picaresque adventure story. If we smile, it is only at Flashman's effrontery, his un- ashamed caddishness. Their literary origins have been set out by Mr. Fraser: ``A life-long love affair with British imperial adventure, fed on tuppenny bloods, Barrackroom Ballads, films like Lives of a Bengal Lancer and The Four Feathers, and the stout-hearted stories for boys which my father won as school prizes in the 1890s.'' In other words, far from being parody, this is the real thing, with just enough cynical edge to render it acceptable in the modern climate (though certainly not acceptable to the politically correct). As often happens in a long series, the central character has matured, even mellowed. Indeed some critics complain that Flashman has become less an anti-hero than a true hero. He still runs away from danger when he can, still seduces, or is seduced by, every beddable woman, still lies, flatters, and cajoles without scruple. But while the Angst-ridden protagonists of most modern fiction could scarcely fight their way out of a recycled paper-bag, there is something to admire in a man so ruthlessly skilled at survival, so capable of getting all those women into bed, so wary and so shrewd. Increasingly, too, Flashman has become his creator's voice in commenting on the historical events among which he moves. In this new book he discusses and muses at length on the politics and factions, the personalities and prejudices, the principles and posing, from which the American Civil War exploded. The assessment is lively, learned, and thought-provoking. Flashy cares nothing about the rights and wrong of slavery, but, as a worldly man, observes and relishes the spectacle of human behavior. The background against which these adventures and conversations occur is most scrupulously drawn, packed with interesting detail. Notes at the back of each Flashman story provide sources, verification, and additional facts to satisfy any reader's query. George MacDonald Fraser's other books shed some light on his own qualifications for this kind of exercise. Quartered Safe Out Here, an account of his experiences as a soldier in the Burma campaign, is as vivid, compassionate, and courageous a picture of small-scale fighting as any the Second World War produced. His Hollywood History of the World was a hilarious but appreciative survey of history as re-told in the movies. Sensibly and characteristically he concludes that, despite Hollywood's glorious follies, we all know a great deal more about world history than we would if Cecil B. de Mille and his imitators had never lived. Underpinning every other virtue stands the crucial one that Mr. Fraser writes extremely well, both in his action sequences and in his painting of the backcloth. Try this passage: Some cynic once observed that it was impossible to see the sights of New York City because there were no cabs to take you about, but it didn't matter because there were no sights to see anyway. I can't agree; whether there were cabs or not in '59 I didn't have time to find out, but for sights, well, there may have been no St. Paul's or Rialto or Arc de Triomphe, or mouldering piles of stone or dreary galleries stuffed with the rubbish of centuries, but there was something far more moving, inspiring, and aesthetically pleasing to the eye, and you didn't need a cab to see 'em, as they sashayed along Broadway past the old Astor House by the Park. I refer to the women of New York, who for beauty of face and form, elegance of dress, and general style and deportment are quite the finest I've struck -- until they open their mouths, that is, which they do most of the time. I don't mean just the trollops either, of whom there were said to be two thousand in a population of three-quarters of a million in '59 (and who counted 'em, I can't imagine, some clergyman, no doubt) but the respectable women of every class. They absolutely ruled the place; New York was a woman's town. . . . For example, you could be on an omnibus, going through the inconvenience of paying the driver through his little window, and three or four dolly-mops would come on chattering and laughing behind you, drop their money in your hand, and expect you to pay it over and bring 'em their change -- perfect strangers, too. Mind you, the reward of a free and easy smile and ``Thanks, chief!'' from a pert New Yorker is a delight; given time, I'd have been haunting that omnibus yet. The blend of the still recognizable and the unfamiliar (New York certainly does not lack cabs today), Flashy's voice and the author's research (delving in travelers' tales and memoirs of the time), is distinctive, typical, and a continual extra joy.