Fraser’s own wartime memories — of bloody night-time battles in a Burmese forest, the execution of prisoners of war, the killing of a wounded Japanese soldier, all the fear and discomfort and confusion — are reworked in Flashman’s experiences of the Indian Mutiny and the Charge of the Light Brigade, and the great disaster at Kabul. All the experiences of battle, real and fictional, are written in the same disordered, impressionistic way, in dreamlike passages of literary high Modernism where sudden death and incongruous, hallucinatory scenes swim together in an old man’s fading memory.
The essential literary conceit of the Flashman novels is the unreliability of memory: vivid scenes are seared into the narrator’s memory (“I can still see before me” or “I will never forget” are phrases which run through both the novels and memoirs) even as the details pass into oblivion. The Flashman novels are, in essence, the disordered, heart-racing flashbacks of Britain’s own imperial memory.
And yet, behind the horror and the fear, the romance of adventure remains. The 40-year-old Fraser wrote the first Flashman novel while Deputy Editor of the Glasgow Herald, one of many from the wartime generation who, trapped behind a desk in middle age, would “throw aside his pencil and stare at the window and exclaim: ‘Oh, God, I wish the war was still on!’” Indeed, the inspiration for Flashman came to Fraser after a rare two-week embed with the Army fighting insurgents in Malaya and Borneo during the waning days of empire, where he had “got the smell of the Orient and soldiering again” and found the prospect of a return to office life too depressing to bear. “They have their hazards, but once you’ve trodden the wild ways you never quite get them out of your system.”
It worked: the Flashman series was a great success, removing Fraser from the newsroom and thrusting him into a world of literary success, and the financial comfort and foreign travel that came with Hollywood screenwriting. Writer of the Octopussy screenplay, Fraser effectively adapted the Bond formula to a Victorian imperial context, conjuring up a world of terrifying, eccentric villains who handily outline their dastardly plans to their trussed-up captive hero; of exotic beauties who give up their bodies in their hundreds for the lustful narrator’s use; of high adventure in romantic locales. Like Bond, the Flashman series is a product of the Sixties, a consoling myth of national derring-do at a period of catastrophic decline.
It is ironic, then, that the elderly Fraser would write so scornfully of “the children of the swinging Sixties” who created a society where “mis-called ‘Victorian values’ are derided, and the permissive society has turned a scornful back on so many things that my generation respected and even venerated”. As he noted sadly: “The tragedy is that when the floodgates are opened only slightly, and possibly with the best of intentions, it’s only a matter of time before they’re torn off their hinges by the torrent.”
Was there any self-awareness in Fraser’s jibe at “the diverting spectacle of those ultra-liberals who rejoiced at the Chatterley decision, pursing their lips and wondering if things haven’t gone a bit too far”? Perhaps, as with Sixties satirists such as John Cleese, the older writer looked back with loss at the passing world he had lampooned, and with guilty disgust at the world he had helped bring into being.
There seems a great disjunct, after all, between the ageing writer’s contempt for the “the interminable explicit sex scenes” of 2000s television and the actual contents of his published body of work. There is far more sex and violence in a Flashman novel than in even the most vulgar output of modern television, though it must be noted that Flashman’s sex life, all “getting my wench buckled to” and “rattling her six ways from Sunday” as “I romped her up and down” and “bulling away like fury” in a manner “like wrestling with a sergeant of dragoons” is far too cartoonish and strangely sexless to be erotic, like a higher-class version of Carry On Up the Khyber. The older Fraser gets, the more cartoonish the sex becomes, until by the time of 1994’s Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, when our anti-hero lies “collapsed supine beneath that ponderous mass of ebony flesh”, “rogering this prime piece of dusky blubber” and “belaboured by balloons of black jelly”, we find ourselves adrift in a world far beyond the erotic.
Reading Flashman today, his world — in which the easy libertinism of the Regency era was being replaced by thin-lipped, Victorian puritanism — seems oddly current. With an awareness of the horrors of war born from his own military service, and the cynicism of a senior journalist all too aware of how the sausage gets made, through Flashman Fraser expressed his contempt for the occasional bouts of war fever that excitable journalism awakens in the British public, with “the press promising swift and condign punishment for the Muscovite tyrant, and street-corner orators raving about how British steel would strike oppression down”.
As a downstream result of Fleet Street’s exertions, Fraser’s hero survives the Charge of the Light Brigade and finds himself chased by Russian soldiers on the road to Mariupol, observing that “the Russians fought as badly and stupidly as they nearly always do”, because “the Russian army was a useless thing, as we’d seen in the Crimea. You can’t make soldiers out of slaves”.
In the run-up to the American Civil War, Flashman finds himself forced to work with the idealistic abolitionist John Brown, who had “fuelled the passions of the wildest elements on both sides, and convinced even sensible and moderate people that the only answer was disunion and war”. In a country torn between two political factions who hated each other with visceral fury, divided on the politics of race, “he put gunsmoke on the breeze, and the whole of America breathed it in — and didn’t find the odour displeasing”.
Of Afghanistan, he observes, like many an editorial last summer, that “possibly there has been a greater shambles in the history of warfare than our withdrawal from Kabul; probably there has not. Even now, after a lifetime of consideration, I am at a loss for words to describe the superhuman stupidity, the truly monumental incompetence, and the bland blindness to reason” of Britain’s ignominious retreat, product of a Victorian bubble where “those who studied the country only from the cantonment at Kabul knew no more about it than you would learn about a strange house if you stayed in one room of it all the time”. Flashman’s world is not, after all, so very distant from our own.
Over time, the Flashman novels became a means for Fraser to process his own experiences of war, and loss and change, and to express his political and moral feelings with a complexity and ambiguity he was incapable of achieving in his memoirs: perhaps not intentionally, but simply because any writer, forced to churn out content regularly enough, ends up revealing more of himself than he intends. A craftsman rather than an artist, his successful formula is still very fine and entertaining handiwork, and the increasing sophistication of the historical footnotes Fraser appended to the novels emerges as the greatest joy of the series.
It is odd that the 2000s world of his memoirs seems further from us today than Flashman’s world did to him — many of his observations, commonplace then, would now be considered hate speech — and yet Flashman’s world of imperial misadventure still seems resonant, and strangely current. Like Flashman and his creator, we are trapped as unwilling protagonists in history, whose endless rhymes and recurrences cannot be escaped.
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