George MacDonald Fraser, RIP

What a guy:

[H]e was an odd mixture of conservative (small “c”) and gleeful rebel, and liked nothing better than to, in the old-fashioned phrase, “épater les bourgeois” or discombobulate the pompously respectable. “Bring down the mighty from their seats?” he chuckled with immense relish.

Flashman is no more:

Sam Munson writes:

No-one would mistake the Flashman books for great literature. They’re full of cheaply-imagined sex and more than a bit of jingoism. But it would be impossible to deny their serious attention to historical detail, their capture of something essential about the vanished life of the British Empire.

Max Boot, eulogizing Flashman’s creator, George MacDonald Fraser, makes the inevitable comparison to Patrick O’Brian’s work:

Fraser has never really gotten his due. Another historical novelist of 19th century warfare—Patrick O’Brian—has received far more critical huzzahs. That is because his Aubrey/Maturin novels are more self-consciously literary, with relatively little action and lots of introspection, dialogue, and description. By contrast, Fraser’s books gallop along at the pace of a runaway mustang, with incident piled atop incident to keep the reader’s attention, many of them violent or salacious. …

O’Brian …was undoubtedly a novelist of great merit. Probably greater merit, in fact, than Fraser. But Fraser was more fun to read.

I’ll say.

Helen Rumbelow, writing in The Times (London), gives advice to women who find a Flashman book or two on the shelves of the guy they’re dating:

[T]here is one type of book so alarming that if you spot it you should gather your coat, write a note saying “it’s been special” and leave immediately. That is, of course, any book from the Flashman series, whose author, George MacDonald Fraser, died this week. Never heard of Sir Harry Flashman? Congratulations, this means that not only are you a typical woman, you are also hanging out with the type of man who is not called “jocular” at dinner parties. Vigilance is still required.

Hmm. I wonder what it says about me that Flashman is one of Mr. Hepzeeba’s favorite characters ever, and that I gave him the first book in the series to read … and that we’ve been married for decades? … Maybe we both enjoy a rollicking good story!

Fraser was also the author of a World War Two memoir, Quartered Safe Out Here, as the Telegraph’s obit notes.

A short, heavily-built man, Fraser held unashamedly reactionary views on law and order. He was particularly firm in his conviction that the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima was justified, believing that among the lives it had saved had been his own.

Nor did he have much time for fashionable attitudes about the emotional delicacy of soldiers and their need for counselling. His experience, in what he acknowledged was another age, was that war was a job that needed to be done, one accomplished by his generation without relish but with a common sense and resolve since vanished from the public spirit.

He aired his views in Quartered Safe Out Here (1992) and was touched when many young people wrote to agree with his sentiments.

More obits here and here.

John Sutherland contends that we Americans don’t get it.

With Flashman, Americans didn’t understand the inverted Victorianism that was Fraser’s gimmick. Instead of Thomas Hughes’s prig Tom Brown (he of the Schooldays) Fraser chronicled the British empire through the dandy-cad who roasts young Tom over the dormitory fire and is, to the relief of decent Rugbeians, expelled by the fearsome Dr Arnold (the most eminent of Lytton Strachey’s eminent Victorians) for drunkenness and hanky panky with the barmaid at the local pub.

Fraser was intending amusing travesty, but, underneath it all, the author really believed in Britishness. When the chips are down (when sepoys, for example, are murdering women and children in the Indian Mutiny) Flashman is a gallant and decent fellow (and no racist). Flashy, not unflashy Tom, embodies what made the empire work.

The Flashman novels spoke eloquently to the British reader. They articulated that mixture of cynicism, shame, and pride that contemporary Britons felt about Victorian values and Great Britain.

Hitchens wrote about Fraser and Flashman in Vanity Fair in 2006. (The full article isn’t available online. Here’s an excerpt.)