Flashman
I’ve just finished reading Flashman by George Macdonald Fraser.
It’s the first in a series of satirical novels based on the fictional character of Harry Flashman, expelled for drunkenness from Rugby School, who goes on to serve with British forces in Afghanistan.
Flashman is the bully from “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” by Thomas Hughes.
He’s also a liar and a coward with enormous good luck. He doesn’t count his luck though while wrestling a dwarf over a snake pit and waiting manacled for a woman he raped to castrate him, but he manages to escape these and other difficulties to become an unlikely hero.
The book is written as a journal and apparently on its release in the United States, 10 out of 34 original reviewers believed that Flashman was a real person.
Fraser’s detailed research gives the book an appearance of authenticity, but Flashman is such a cad that it’s hard to believe anyone could be fooled.
The real events in this book concern the disastrous retreat from Kabul in 1842 of which only a few hundred survived out of 14,000 due to General Elphinstone’s incompetence.
In the novel, before deciding to retreat, “Elphy” sent for his pistols. His servant dropped one, firing a bullet which grazed the general’s buttock. A fellow officer remarked:
The Afghans murder our people, try to make off with our wives, order us out of the country, and what does our commander do? Shoots himself in the arse — doubtless in an attempt to blow his brains out. He can’t have missed by much.
The book is filleded with gems like that one and I can’t wait to continue the series.
I'm a 41-year-old father of four working as a newspaper editor at Mount Gambier in South Australia.
