GOOD OLD FLASHY:

What makes a hero? (Harry Mount, 3/26/05, The Spectator)

‘Flashman’s just a monster,’ says George MacDonald Fraser. ‘He’s extremely unpleasant but he knows how to present a front to the world, and at least he’s honest about himself. But that was because he assumed that his memoirs would never be published.’

I’d just been putting to the author of the Flashman novels the theory of this magazine’s editor: that far from being a scoundrel, Flashman — the fag-roasting rotter thrown out of Rugby in Tom Brown’s Schooldays only to pop up in the great historic moments of the Victorian age — was in fact the toppest of eggs; an accidental hero who’s actually the genuine article because he at least admits to his flaws.

‘It’s usually my female readers who write and say that,’ Fraser says in his perfectly modulated Miss-Jean-Brodie-goes-to-Glasgow vowels, unflattened by 35 years as a tax exile on the Isle of Man, ‘— that he’s actually a very modest hero who makes himself out to be a coward and a cad. If that’s the way they want to see him, fair enough. But you must remember, he raped a girl in the first book; since then, he’s never needed to.’

Fraser’s 80th birthday on 2 April coincides with the publication of Flashman on the March, the 12th in the series. [...]

Carrying on regardless is Flashman’s forte, with his unwilling starring roles throughout the blood-soaked annals of the Victorian age. At the retreat from Kabul in 1842, Flashman is so terrified of falling victim to a badmash’s jezail that he tries to hand over the regiment’s colours to the enemy, only to be rescued in the nick of time, colours still in hand, unconscious, once more the accidental hero.

Flashman’s slug-like trail winds its way up the peaks and down the troughs of the 19th century; he shoots General Custer at Little Big Horn, he launches the Charge of the Light Brigade with a volley of farts brought on by some dodgy Russian champagne, and he stars in the Chinese Opium Wars, the Indian Mutiny and Rorke’s Drift. He always behaves odiously, but his fraudulent triumphs lead him into more and more unwelcome fixes. And he does it all with lashings of élan. Even Fraser acknowledges that Flashman has style.

‘I do remember thinking he was by far the most attractive character in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. The book fell apart after he left. My own feeling is that Thomas Hughes realised that Flashman was in danger of taking the book over and so he dropped him.’

That devil-may-care aura means the title of the real Flashman has plenty of claimants. ‘My old housemaster wrote to me and said, “I know who this is; knew him in India.” Everybody thinks he’s based on Sir Richard Burton. I knew nothing about Burton. A bit rough on Burton, who so far as I know wasn’t a scoundrel and certainly wasn’t a coward.’

There is no one original Flashman, although Fraser acknowledges there are plenty of people who take after him. ‘I see Flashy characteristics on the political scene; I won’t say where. They haven’t got his style. David Niven was keen to play him; he would have made a wonderful Flashman. Or his friend Errol Flynn, who had that shifty quality.’

They've none of the literary pretense of the Aubrey/Maturin books, but they're great fun.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 29, 2005 10:34 PM