I know a Brit here who, when Fraser died, claimed in all seriousness that the Flashman series was how he and many of his countrymen learned about 19th-century British history after having slept through it in school.
I read them in published order last time. The Dastardly Bastard as protagonist. They are great.
The Kindle books are only available in the UK, most of them! I feel betrayed. Don’t the Brits know we get all the cool technology and they get, like, boiled things?
Liam Neeson has been looking pretty cadaverous lately.
Poor guy. It’s been a bad year for him.
There’s only one possibility: Michael Douglas.
I made the mistake of picking up the first one, in which Flashman bangs his father’s mistress out of spite and rapes an Afghan woman. I guess I went in expecting “charming rogue” and so was surprised by “sociopathic thug.”
But a charming sociopathic slug.
Wait until you get to the one where he sells the black hooker into Indian slavery in Santa Fe. (He does get feel pangs of regret about that, and she does wreak her revenge in later years, which directly leads to Flashman’s involvement with Custer at Little Bighorn.)
Remember he was (at first) doing a faux-hommage to the Tom Brown books, in which Flashman was, indeed, a near sociopath (repeatedly subjecting the fags (heh heh heh) to near-immolation, etc.). The Flashman books were high-concept (Fraser was a movie maven/scriptwriter among other things) antihero stuff.
As the series progressed, his “caddishness” grew thin, as the conceit could hardly carry through ca. 15 books. It was always Forrest Gumpish (shoehorning his holy-fool, or holy-cad in this instance, into every historical episode of the 19th Century), and the shtick of cowardly-whoremonger-who-comes-across-as-hero wore out as Fraser realized that (1) people wouldn’t continue to like/be interested in a complete scumbag; and (2) there’s only so many times a character can behave as an absolute poltroon and be perceived as a hero. In later books, while still proclaiming his cowardice, Flashman (“against his will but having no other choice”) behaves in ways that are objectively, well, heroic.
When I pick these books up again, I am surprised by how badly they wear. I liked them all the first time. I’m a history fan, and Fraser taught me a lot. But his history-geek’s penchant for dotting every historical i carries through at the expense of true drama and characterization. O’Brien reads far, far better on second, third, fourth reading – the characters have depth, and grow.
Best thing Fraser ever wrote: “Quartered Safe Out Here,” his memoir of his war in Burma. Outstanding. His late-life memoir of his professional days was also good.
My view of John Brown was shaped to a great extent by Henry Kyd Nelson – he was a very young ADC to Stonewall, and wrote a great book. He considered Brown a wicked murderous maniac. Well, he would, I suppose. Everyone owes it to themselves to visit Harper’s Ferry – even if you don’t like history, it’s just beautiful.
For the actor, Kevin Kline might be good. (Certainly I can imagine him as Brown more than I can as Edwin Stanton, who he’s going to play in Robert Redford’s new Mary Surratt movie.)
(Disregard)
How I (just barely) survived John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry
One Saturday when I was in the sixth grade, our whole class went on a field trip to Harper’s Ferry (HF being one of West Virginia’s few major historical sites, most kids who go to school in West Virginia end up visiting the site sooner or later). Once we got there, we were taken on a walking tour (t’s a really small town, you can walk all over it in less than an hour) and saw lots of old stone houses with cannonball holes in their walls from John Brown’s raid on the twn and the armory. The armory itself was a converted into a museum; the exhibits were about slavery (some nasty old iron manacles, a diorama of field hands picking cotton, 19th-century farm implements and household goods, and like that) and Civil War stuff – lots of guns and swords and cannonballs mostly, and mannequins dressed in Union blues and Rebel grays.
Then came the finale – a series of life-sized dioramas depicting scenes from John Brown’s life story, with recorded narrative on the PA . This started out pretty tame, but quickly progressed to a somewhat macabre, not to say gruesome, scene of JB’s big epiphany about the wrongness of slavery when he witnessed a slave being whipped to death. In no time at all, we were gathered around the final exhibit, looking down at this life-sized figure of JB mounting the gallows, head bowed in prayer and the Battle Hymn of the Republic on the PA. The narrator’s voice fell silent…the music swelled to a dramatic crescendo…and the John Brown mannequin all-of-a-sudden raised its head and looked up at us – and its glass eyes reflected the stage lighting so that they FLASHED! like car headlights.
Have you ever heard three dozen sixth-graders scream at once? I have!
Several other notable Civil War people were involved in stopping the raid or in later events. E.g., Stonewall Jackson and John Wilkes Booth were both present at his hanging and J.E.B. Stuart assisted Lee.
I have a semi-relative who is descended from one of Brown’s relations and has several of his old letters and such.
There are many people around who deny that the origins of the Civil War had anything to do with slavery, so I bring up Bloody Kansas, Harpers Ferry, etc.
Booth actually had great respect for Brown even though they were total opposites in viewpoints. He mentioned him frequently to his co-conspirators, and in some of his letters to his sister Asia, as an abolitionist worthy of honor because unlike most of them he had the courage of his convictions (i.e. willing to kill or be killed for the cause). Even at 20 Booth was apparently already envisioning a short, bloody and glorious (as he perceived it) life (it’s PIPPIN meets ASSASSINS!).