Flash For Freedom

George MacDonald Fraser’s Flash for Freedom! sends Harry Flashman into the nineteenth-century slave trade, which is about as morally promising as giving a fox the keys to a henhouse and asking it to write a report on poultry welfare. Flashman, professional coward, opportunist, liar, seducer, accidental hero and veteran of surviving history by ducking at the correct moment, finds himself swept into another grand imperial catastrophe while insisting, naturally, that none of it is his fault.

This time the great rogue is dragged from polite Britain into the Atlantic world of slavery, abolition, shipboard brutality, American politics, plantation society, pursuit, disguise and danger, all while trying to preserve the one cause to which he has ever shown unwavering devotion: Harry Flashman. Fraser’s trick, as ever, is to drop his appalling narrator into real historical darkness and let the contrast do its wicked work. Flashman is funny because he is shameless; the history is not funny at all, which is precisely why the book has teeth.

The novel’s route takes in slave ships, abolitionist fervour, the American South, racial hypocrisy, political theatre, personal panic and Flashman’s genius for being mistaken for a man of principle whenever he is merely trying not to be killed. He is the sort of character history should reject on moral grounds, yet history keeps finding uses for him, probably because history itself has rarely been overly selective about company.

There is a fine irony in the title. “Freedom” sounds noble, ringing, rhetorical, fit for speeches and banners. Add Flashman and suddenly it becomes slippery, compromised, self-serving and extremely nervous. He may end up near worthy causes, but not because he has sought moral improvement. If Flashman advances liberty, it is usually while backing away from danger, chasing a woman, escaping a scandal or misunderstanding the consequences until they become unavoidable.

Fraser’s writing gives the whole filthy century its proper mixture of swagger and stink. The Flashman books are historical adventures with an unreliable conscience: fast, learned, viciously comic, footnoted, politically incorrect in the old deliberate sense, and far sharper than a casual glance suggests. They expose the Victorian heroic pose by putting a coward inside it and watching how often the costume still fits.

For readers of historical fiction, black comedy, Victorian adventure, anti-heroes, imperial satire and novels where the narrator deserves a slap but keeps telling the story too well to dismiss, Flash for Freedom! is prime Flashman. It is outrageous, clever, uncomfortable and briskly indecent, like a school prize book that escaped, stole a horse and joined a scandal.

Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A solid HarperCollins paperback, fit for any shelf that can accommodate slavery, satire, cowardice, footnotes, bad behaviour and the horrible suspicion that history’s great men may sometimes have been standing next to absolute rotters who wrote better memoirs.

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