Flashman on the March
George MacDonald Fraser HarperCollins, 317pp, £17.99
ISBN 000719739X
Flashy's back! It has been five years since we last uncovered a packet of the old boy's memoirs, but the Zelig of the British empire, the recalcitrant witness to and improbable hero of the opium wars, the Afghanistan campaign, the Crimean war and the battles of the Raj, shows no signs of ageing. The vices - lechery, cowardice ("greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down someone else's life for his own") and duplicity - that have made him such a loveable rogue are all present, as is his ability to dodge the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
In this chapter of his eventful and disreputable life, Sir Harry Flashman is caught up in one of the footnotes of the imperial age. Fleeing from Trieste and an enraged German whose teenage niece he has deflowered, he arrives in 1868 in Abys-sinia, where a mercurial local chieftain is holding a group of British emissaries hostage. A rescue mission is under way and Flashman, never a willing volunteer for such a sortie, has the simple task of delivering funds to buy off rival despots. Not for the first time, however, his "audacious" reputation precedes him, and it isn't long before the commanding British officer has found a role for him in Kipling's Great Game.
When George MacDonald Fraser, who besides being a novelist has worked as a Hollywood screenwriter, published a memoir of his life in words and pic- tures three years ago, it was greeted with considerable disappointment. There were some passable yarns about Steve McQueen and Ollie Reed, but these were punctuated with tirades against the PC tendencies of new Labour (the book was serialised in the Daily Mail, which tells you plenty). So, as I picked up this, the 12th novel in the series, I wondered whether Fraser's truculence had led him to the same literary dyspepsia that consumed Kingsley Amis, himself a Flashy fan, in his declining years.
The answer is a qualified no. Fraser is still adept at exploiting the potential of the first-person narrative, revelling in the gulf between the public perception of Flashy's honour and his innate dishonesty. Yet he also deploys Flashman's candour to debunk the noble rhetoric of Victorian England. "If the slave trade has been swept off the face of the seas," says Flashy, "it hasn't really been the work of reformers and statesmen with lofty ideals in London, Paris and Washington, but because a long-forgotten host of fairly feckless young Britons did it for fun."
The most serious shortcoming of this instalment is that Fraser sometimes appears to be on autopilot - which would not be surprising, given that he has been telling essentially the same story for more than 30 years. Though an outstanding narrator of battle sequences, he seems a little too eager here to charge ahead into the cut and thrust of armed combat - a damned sight more eager than craven Flashy, certainly. Before this, there is misadventure without sufficient intrigue, fornication without ample flirting.
As ever, the notes accompanying the text are both informative and ironic. "While they were deeply attached to one another, she [Flashman's wife] bore his frequent absences with equanimity," reads one. Anyone unable to appreciate the comic brilliance of that "equanimity" should begin working his (it would be fraudulent to pretend that there is much feminine appeal here) way through the earlier Flashman novels, in which Fraser, rather as his hero is erroneously viewed by his peers, has already banked enough credit to see off a few minor criticisms.
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