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White Rogue's Burden
| Article
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19682 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1991 |
1,576 Words |
| Author
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David H. Ehrlich
David H. Ehrlich, an avid theatergoer, is an independent
writer based in Washington, D.C. He has previously written
numerous essays for The World & I. |
FLASHMAN AND THE MOUNTAIN OF LIGHT
George MacDonald Fraser
New York: Knopf, 1991
365 pp., $22.00
The ninth packet of the papers of Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., has recently arrived in bookstores. Taking its place beside George MacDonald Fraser's earlier yarns, in which the notorious Flashman brought the nineteenth-century British colonial wars to life, this volume details the venerable soldier's participation in the First Sikh War of 1845.
Mind you, Flashman is not your traditional British hero. Flashman did not exist. And since he did not exist, he had to be invented--which he was, but not by Fraser. The credit belongs to Thomas Hughes (1822-96), who briefly introduced the odious character in his redoubtable 1857 warhorse, Tom Brown's Schooldays.
As those who may have enjoyed Hughe's sentimentalized description of an English public school circa 1835 may remember, Flashman was the upper-form bully who tried to push the virtuous young Tom around, induced other boys to toss him in a blanket, and was ultimately expelled from Rugby School in the year 1839 for (horrors!) drunkenness.
At that point, Flashman passed out of Hughes' narrative and, for all practices, out of existence, too. But Fraser, a witty amateur historian and student of British imperialism, rediscovered and resurrected the old reprobate, fleshed him out, and used him as a device for waving the Union Jack around the world.
Beginning with Flashman (published in 1969), Fraser began placing his antihero at the center of the most exciting tableaux in Britain's acquisition of the empire "on which the sun never set." Flashman parlays his already well-developed penchants for lying, bullying, cowardice, and lechery into the highest military award for gallantry, the Victoria Cross, while keeping his skin whole, in places as diverse as Afghanistan, Madagascar, Sarawak, the Crimea, the Ohio River, Little Bighorn, and, in this latest escapade, the Punjab.
Since Flashman never existed, Fraser feels free to interpose him at the scene of actual events, imagine what he said and did, and occasionally use him to express him own opinions about what actually happened. But, at the same time, Fraser relies on primary source materials to report the facts
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