Flashman on the March: A hero's credentials

Last week's endorsement in this space by Gary Corby was just the most recent recommendation I'd received of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series of comic historical adventures, but it's the one that pushed me over the edge to try them myself (though I'm starting not at the beginning, but with Flashman on the March, last of the twelve books).

The series takes Flashman, the scapegrace schoolboy of Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), and puts him in the middle of just about every British military engagement of the nineteenth century and a number of American ones. The books, published between 1969 and 2005, won praise for their historical accuracy,  and here's what P.G. Wodehouse had to say: “If ever there was a time when I felt that ‘watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet’ stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman."

Flashman needs no more praise after an endorsement from P.G. Wodehouse, so I'll confine myself to a few items from the biographical note appended to the beginning of Flashman on the March. (The books purport to be Flashman's diaries):

"FLASHMAN, Harry Paget, brigadier-general, V.C., K.C.B., K.C.I.E. ... Order of the Elephant, Denmark (temporary) ... San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth, 4th class ... occasional actor and impersonator. Hon. mbr of numerous societies and clubs, including ... hon. pres. Mission for Reclamation of Reduced Females ... (performed first recorded `hat trick,' wickets of Felix, Pilch, Mynn, for 14 runs ... )"

Yep, I can see why Wodehouse liked this guy. I think I will, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011