Review: Flashman

So yesterday I finished up reading "Flashman," the first book in the aptly named Flashman Papers series by George MacDonald Fraser. These books feature the adventures of Harry Flashman, a Victorian-era soldier and adventurer, who is secretly a coward and a scumbag who takes advantage of lucky situations to appear to be a hero. Flashman was originally featured in a Victorian-era school story called "Tom Brown's Schooldays," in which he was a bully. "Flashman" opens with him being thrown out of Rugby School for drunkeness and going to London to become an officer in the army. The book details his first posting in a regiment in England (which he specifically picked so he wouldn't have to do any actual fighting), his transfer to Scotland (where he is forced into a marriage to a factory owner's daughter), his posting to India (which he finds to be less horrible than imagined), and, containing most of the book, his posting in Afghanistan, in a horribly bungled campaign by the British to control the country.

Flashman himself is a surprisingly charming character. He is utterly without heroism, but to get ahead in life (especially in the army) he knows how best to fake it. He is also remarkably self-aware, fully admitting that he's a coward and more than a little bit of a bastard, which softens the blow when time after time he does exactly what a character in a British soldier novel SHOULDN'T do. A couple of times i wished the bastard would grow some courage and do something heroic, but that usually passed to humor as he manipulated a situation to appear to be a hero. He is also a remarkably intelligent character, and his contempt for his foolish, arrogant, or stupid commanders forgives his amorality most of the time.

"Flashman" is also a remarkably fast-paced book, especially since Fraser has also written a very detailed (and historically accurate) book. The people Flashman meets were real people and the stuff he witnesses actually happened in real life. Something about this made the story even more exciting. A part of the shtick of the book is that Fraser is adapting the memoirs of the {fictional) Flashman, so Fraser occasionally has end notes clarifying or correcting Flashman's historical mistakes. It works remarkably well.

THere are a lot more books in this series, and I hope to read them all (although I have no idea how easy to obtain they are in the US). I really really liked this book.