Grown up
Harriet Waugh
Flashman and the Redskins George Mac- Donald Fraser (Collins £7.95)
After a pause of five years George Mac- Donald Fraser has given us his seventh novel featuring Harry Flashman, that dreadful bully, lecher and coward, captured and transmogrified from the pages of Tom .8rown's School Days. The novel follows on Plashman for Freedom in continuing Plashy's adventures as a frontiersman in America. With his career as a slaver now abandoned, this chronicle features his up and down (sometimes upside-down) rela- tionship with Red Indians and ends, after a gaP of 25 years, (the book is divided into t.wo parts) with his accidental involvement In Custer's Last Stand. Despite this ex- cellent climactic ending in which he is par- tially, but not fatally, scalped by his bastard Indian son, the second half of the book is less funny and exciting than the first. Plashman's sedate return as a tourist aged 53 concentrates too much on introducing him and the reader to the great names of American history and folklore. Because of this the story becomes slightly static as he and Elspeth, his complacently amoral wife, Make the social rounds of New York and Washington -discussing Indian policy. 1 Flashman is relegated to the un- characteristic role of witness and such inac- tivity hangs heavy on both him and us.
' However, the first part which opens with our hero aged 28 and on the run in New Orleans accused of murder, slave stealing, and other anti-social activities gives ex- cellent value for money. In a desperate at- tempt to save his neck, he contracts a °Igamous marriage to Susie, an aging, golden-hearted brothel keeper, accompany- 418 her wagon load of slave prostitutes across the badlands heading for Sacramen- 10, all the while being whooped and shot at Y unfriendly Apaches. Still later, after nolding an abandoned fortress against the Indians, he is captured by them while on a scalping expedition with some front- ,lersmen. Following local practice, they g, ang him upside down from a tree and are looking forward to lighting a fire under urn. Then, unexpectedly, their chief's naughter, in the manner of Pocahontas, decides to marry him, in spite of his un- shaven condition. Flashy takes each new domestic situation in his stride, although some Indian customs, like their version of the Turkish bath, take some getting used to:
; It was black as Egypt's night, and I had to I reep over nude bodies that grunted and
1 'leaved and snarled ... I was choking with 1 the stench and dripping with sweat as I middle of a great heap of gasping, writhing Apaches ... I could barely breath, and it seemed that warm oil was being poured over us from above — but it was simply reeking sweat, trickling down from the mass of bodies overhead.'
MacDonald Fraser is extremely good at describing unromantic couplings, bloody battles, revolting carnage, humorously repulsive torture. 'As I fled I lifted my head and gazed on such a scene as even I can hardly match from all my memories of bloody catastrophe ... There must have been a score of them, I can't tell, standing and lying and sprawling in a disordered mass, the pistols and carbines cracking while the mounted wave of war-bonnets and eagle feathers rode round and through and over them, the clubs and lances rising and falling to yells of "Hoon! Hoon!" while Gall's footmen grappled and stabbed and scalped at close quarters ...' Still, his early novels gave a great deal more. Harry Flashman in America gives token acknowledgement to this earlier self but something terrible has happened to him during his progression through the seven chronicles: he has grown up! We are now faced with Boys' Own adventures, with humour thrown in to make the reader feel sophisticated. As long as somebody is being scalped and Flashman is weaving in and out of improbable situations it is possible to overlook the fact that his nature has suf- fered a sea change: he has become Errol Flynn. Nowadays he behaves commonsen- sically and even with everyday — dare one say it? — bravery. Although he constantly declares himself a coward — and he certain- ly takes a judicial interest in his own sur- vival — he no longer convinces. There is a lack of abjectness in his fear, and his declarations of cowardice have the ring of a hollow boast. With the sole exception of the occasion when he sells his devoted mistress to the Indians for 2,000 dollars, his bad behaviour is no longer vicious.
He has, alas, deteriorated into an endear- ing scallywag. There is even a dreadful mo- ment when he kills an Indian for no other reason than that the Indian is about to split a white baby down the middle. And another when he shows a developing social cons- cience: 'That was the most horrible thing of all — not the hanging of bodies, or the scalped corpses, or the vile stench, but the fact that none of Gallantin's followers paid the slightest heed . . . I've served with some hard cases, but never with any who didn't betray horror or disgust or pity or at least interest at such beastly sights. But not this bunch of ruffians.' And as to sex (admit- tedly that change happened fairly on in the saga) he has become boringly proficient at it. It was funnier when he misinterpreted the signals or had to have recourse to rape to find a partner. But then none of the subsequent books quite measures up to the first, The Flashman Papers, which juxta- poses his cowardice, boastfulness and vicious amorality against a military background where, phoenix-like, his credibility is enhanced by each sortie into betrayal.
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