Auberon Waugh on new novels
Flash for Freedom George MacDonald Fraser (Barrie and Jenkins £1.75) The Umbrella Man Giles Gordon (Allison and Busby £2.10) The Christmas rush is now over and there is time to look back at some novels which escaped review in the frenzy of big names and important works competing for the Booker Prize. George MacDonald Fraser's latest adventure story in the Flashman series was ignored partly because I reckoned it would do very nicely without any help from me, partly because the second in the series, Royal Flash, seemed much less good than the first and I mistakenly feared that Mr Fraser had shot his bolt. Flash for Freedom is his hest yet; while the other two could only be read by those seeking enjoyment, this one is full of selfimproving information about the slave trade and even includes an unexpected and rightly disconcerting moral about the beastliness of slavery. I should not be surprised if quite a few readers decide never again to agitate for the return of slavery, putting the book down sadder and wiser.
Readers of the earlier two novels will remember how Flashman, the cheat and bully of Tom Brown's Schooldays, becomes a hero of Victorian England through his cowardly exploits in the Afghan war. The second book, a straight crib from Anthony Hope's Rupert of Hentzau took him into a Ruritanian princess and various entanglements with Bismarck. This one introduces us to Disraeli, Abraham Lincoln and Lord George Bentinck, but the best part is an account of buying slaves in West Africa, transporting them across the Atlantic, a slave auction in Memphis and his meeting with an unbearably arrogant Negro intellectual, forerunner of so many pillars of the London social and artistic scene today.
The captain of Flashman's slaver is a mad ex-don from Oriel. After many adventures he escapes from this man to become a slave-driver on a Mississippi plantation; is made into a slave by the plantation owner after being found in bed with his sadistic midget of a wife; runs away with a beautiful and intelligent slave girl whom he sells in order to pay their passage to the Free States; then comes the reunion from which Flashman just recovers in time to leave the girl with a posse of slave catchers, behaving ignominiously himself.
For my own part, I can only give thanks that there is still someone like Mr Fraser around with the wit and narrative skill to write these books, and the intelligence to see that they are exactly what the modern age requires. His portrait of Victorian society is far more convincing and far more vivid than that of any contemporary writer. The great thing about Victorian society is that it no longer changes; those who consciougly try to write a book about modern, urban society are almost certain to come unstuck; either nobody recognises it or, if people do, nobody is interested. Modern urban life is boring enough without having to read about it as well. Mr Fraser, who is on a very good wicket with the Victorians, deserves to sell in hundreds of thousands for his burlesque alone. This is his description of a battle at sea: If I were Bosun McHearty I daresay I could describe how we jibed our futtock gans'Is clewed up the orlop bitts and weathered her, d'ye see, with a lee helm and all plain sail in the bilges, burn me buttocks. As it was, I just stuck like a shadow to a big Portugal nigger of the deck watch, called Lord Peabody, and tailed on behind him . .
Mr Giles Gordon is quite another kettle of fish. Anybody who picked up his latest novel in a bookshop might well drop it like a scalded cat. Just to show how publishers contrive to frighten away bookbuyers, I give an extensive quotation from the blurb: The Umbrella Man is a story about love (not a love story, not a story . . . ) . . . Through a prism elliptically Giles Gordon observes the affair which doesn't, then does, flower between Felix and Delia, Delia and Felix. He looks at it from four viewpoints, four angles — without analysing, without commenting. Each of the four parts of the book is stylistically different from the other parts, as if four different people were observing — or participating in — the same events . . . There is a strange and dreamlike party in a decrepit house; a passionate scene by the sea shore after midnight; a series of letters from Greece where Delia has fled to escape Felix; a past and a future but never any present.
The Umbrella Man is a story about love, how people become enslaved. It is easier to love than not to. A love story, a story.
Why on earth do publishers write such rubbish? On the off-chance that some pathetic book-reviewer on the Times will describe the book as " important "? Mr Gordon's book has many faults, it is true, but it also has some virtues, and it is not nearly as bad as the publishers make out.
A lonely, ageing bachelor virgin falls for a young widow with a baby, she for him; on their first meeting, the widow has accidentally dropped the baby, killing it. Being tongue-tied, she says nothing to the fellow, and he responds by stealing the baby, little realising it is dead. Back in his bachelor apartment he assumes he has killed the baby, bouncing it up and down on his bed to see if it is still alive. Then he wraps it up in newspaper, uncertain how to get rid of it, eventually dropping it over a railway bridge into the funnel of a passing train. All this is pure Ealing comedy, and the sexy parts of the book are extremely effective too.
The total effect is weakened by the way the two narrators keep jumping in and out of the first person singular; by well-known cliches like the strange and dreamlike party; the slow motion girl-getting-dressedin-the-morning routine; the occasional ghastly attempts at toughness:
Her breasts flowed downwards from her chest, sliding down her sides like over-ripe Camembert oozing outwards when exposed to the mid-day sun
But for all that, Mr GorCePon's book is a jolly sexy little thing, if slight. He has sufficient originality, as well as a rather endearing tenderness, to write an extremely good novel, if only publishers and reviewers did not encourage him to try and look at things through a prism, elliptically.
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