Farewell to Flashman

...But now that they were back, George MacDonald Fraser was not in the least bit delighted: “Tony Blair is not just the worst prime minister we’ve ever had, but by far the worst prime minister we’ve ever had...

...But he does not romanticize or airbrush the gruesome and exploitative aspects of imperialism...

...But his plots were far more credible than Fleming’s, because they were based on the scarcely believable facts about high-Victorian empire, and his characters were much more authentic because, well, because they were authentic...

...Unlike most old-school Tories, also, he shows an admiration for the nascent power of the United States and sets a good deal of his narrative in this country, with two excellent portrayals of Abraham Lincoln and one unsettlingly vivid depiction of John Brown...

...And there is charm in the fact that Wodehouse himself, who seldom commented on other writers, said, “If ever there was a time when I felt that ‘watcher-of-theskieswhen-a-new-planet’ stuff, it was when I read the fi rst Flashman...

...I talked to him by phone on his 80th birthday— “Same day as Charlemagne, Casanova, Hans Christian Andersen, and Kenneth Tynan,” as he stoutly told me— and found him suitably reactionary...

...Just as many people more than halfbelieve that Sherlock Holmes was a real person, so Fraser used to get letters from people offering to put him in touch with distant Flashman descendants...

...I can remember the mingled shock and glee with which my radical friend Andrew Cockburn and I discovered, over a steaming curry that was another colonial legacy, that we had both recently fallen for the same author and character...

...it would have been wellnigh impossible to imagine that British soldiers would be again in action in the historic battle-honor territories of Afghanistan and Mesopotamia...

...In later years, and partly for purposes of tax exile, Fraser withdrew to the Isle of Man: one of the better-preserved of the British Isles and a place which reminded him, as he said, of England as it used to be...

...Meeting Oscar Wilde at the theater, Flashman describes him as looking like “an overfed trout in a toupe,” which is about as much damage as one could hope to infl ict in six words...

...Of Fraser’s robust Toryism there can be no doubt...

...Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: A Biography...

...BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Looking back over the nearly 40 years since I fi rst found myself immersed in a Flashman story, perhaps the single most striking thing about the experience is the date...

...Pot boiler,” said John Updike, rather wince-makingly, about the Fraser formula...

...It somehow didn’t seem to “fi t,” amid all the feverish enthusiasms of the late sixties, that one should be so thoroughly absorbed by the doings of a racist-sexist-imperialist-you-nameit military offi cer...

...In 1969, when Flashy fi rst stepped onto the page (or should I say back onto the page where Thomas Hughes had left him...

...Flashman affronts Benjamin Disraeli with anti-Jewish taunts and teaches a slave girl to say “Me Lady Caroline Lamb,” and his extraordinary lack of sensitivity is done with exquisite care...

...What he writes about the Zulus and the Sikhs and the Afghans is full of respect and admiration...

...Not unlike Wodehouse, the Flashman novels transport one into a readymade alternative world, populated with an extraordinary cast of characters...

...In bold contrast to Wodehouse, however, almost all these characters are real-life historical ones, with only the chief protagonist being annexed from an earlier fi ction...

...I have met that look, of the confi rmed addict and fellow-sufferer, many times since...

...If that reminds you of Ian Fleming, perhaps it’s no disgrace...

...But he eventually found a home with Herbert Jenkins, the independent house that had already earned itself immortality by bringing out P.G...

...In addition to this, he was extremely and consistently funny...

...Managing to patrol the frontiers of fact and fi ction in an almost postmodern fashion, Fraser always insisted that he was merely the editor of a trove of papers discovered (“wrapped in oilskin”) at an English country-house auction, while daringly inserting his hero, in Royal Flash, into the action of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda or, in a later story called Flashman and the Tiger, bang into the middle of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventure of the Empty House...

...Flashman himself always remembers to be properly contemptuous of any grand overarching theories, bluffl y opining, “In my experience the course of history is as often settled by someone’s having a belly-ache, or not sleeping well, or a sailor getting drunk, or some aristocratic harlot waggling her backside...

...There was some element of truth in this...

...What he writes about the slave trade, say, or about the horrifi c British destruction of the Imperial Palace at Beijing, is unvarnished and accurate...

...He described the British Empire as “the greatest thing that ever happened to an undeserving world” and bore arms for it in Burma (admittedly against another empire—the Japanese one—that was infi nitely worse...

...It is an illustration of historic irony, and of the bizarre operations of fortune’s wheel, that that very tone of voice should now be an indicator of the outlook of the British Right...

...Maybe it was partly the period that explained the fatuity by which a dozen British publishers greeted George MacDonald Fraser with rejection slips...

...Wodehouse...

...It makes my blood boil to think of the British soldiers who’ve died for that little liar...

...Every tale had a super-villain, a super-minx, and a harrowing escape from torture or death...

...It took nerves of steel for Fraser to pit Flashman against Otto von Bismarck, or to pitch him into the sack with Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar, but the upshot was that good historians found themselves praising his verisimilitude, and many people owe all their knowledge of, say, Afghanistan to the voluminous footnotes that accompany each adventure...

...Fraser wrote the screenplay for Octopussy...