Eyes Well Damned: George MacDonald Fraser (1925-2008)

Pardon a break from regularly-scheduled SharkBook.Com chicanery

One of the reasons that Chris and I decided that writing a book together might not be such a bad idea and why the experience was, well, a hell of a lot of fun (and why the next one will also be a tandem effort), is that while we each had our own reading interests, the list of our favourite books was quite similar: “The Ginger Man”, by JP Donleavy, (top on my list) , “Confederacy of Dunces,” by John Kennedy Toole, and the works of Charles Bukowski, and Mordecai Richler.

These writers never tried to come across as precious with what they wrote, and the stories they told were never hampered by artifice – among their works you won't find a single humorless 800-page family-saga bummer of a book. They wrote against and in the face of political correctness, puritanism, and pretence and their books found a home with audiences who welcomed this blast of frank talk on their bookshelves. Indeed, they were writing for readers who've heard dirty jokes before and are ready to laugh at the next -- so long as it's a good one.

George MacDonald Fraser, who died this week, at age 82, was among the best of them and his creation of Victorian-era soldier, Harry Paget Flashman, VC, KCB, KCIE (1822-1915), will go down as one of the most entertaining anti-heroes of all – a more well-traveled, though equally caddish Sebastian Dangerfield of Donleavy's Ginger Man, whose exploits were captured in 12 hugely entertaining novels that scored what to my knowledge has to be the only hat-trick in the history of the written word of top-notch historical accuracy, hilarity, and first-rate prose.

Fraser himself led a fascinating life – everywhere from Burma to Saskatchewan (and I think he might have went from summer to winter in both of those places, which makes it all the more impressive) – and was, like his character, a case study in how to make the bloody best of it by living life on your own terms, and damning the parking pylons -- i.e. Sir George speaking on his writing and offering advice to newcomers: "It may be tripe but it's my tripe - and I do urge other authors to resist encroachments on their brain-children and trust their own judgment rather than that of some zealous meddler with a diploma in creative punctuation who is just dying to get into the act."

A good obituary can be found here with more of that, but I thought it best to point to a bit of his writing for a true sense of Flashman, and the brilliant satirist who created him.

Harry Flashman is a Victorian-age colonel, undercover in native garb just prior to the Indian Mutiny. Here Fraser, as Flashy, helps show how the proselytizing efforts of British commanders undoubtedly played a part in the downfall of the Raj (From “Flashman in the Great Game"):

“I doubt if any commander in the old days would have done what Carmichael-Smith did in the way of preaching-parades either. I hadn’t believed it in the barrack gossip, but sure enough, the next Sunday this coffin-faced Anglican fakir, the Rev. Reynolds had a muster on the maidan, and we had to listen to him expounding the Parable of the Prodigal Son, if you please. He did it through a brazen-lunged rissaldar (major in the Indian army) who interpreted for him, and you never heard the like. Reynolds lined it out in English, from the Bible, and the rissaldar stood there with his staff under his arm, at attention, with his whiskers bristling, bawling his own translation:

“There was a zamindar (farmer), with two sons. He was a mad zamindar, for while he yet lived he gave to the younger his portion of the inheritance. Doubtless he raised it from a moneylender. And the younger spent it all whoring in the bazaar, and drinking sherab (strong drink). And when his money was gone he returned home, and his father ran to meet him, for he was pleased – God alone knows why. And in
his foolishness, the father slew his only cow – he was evidently not a Hindoo – and they feasted on it. And the older son, who had been dutiful and stayed at home, was jealous, I cannot tell for what reason, unless the cow was to have been part of his inheritance. But his father, who did not like him, rebuked the older son. This story was told by Jesus the Jew, and if you believe it you will not go to Paradise, but instead will sit on the right-hand side of the English Lord God Sahib who lives in Calcutta. And there you will play musical instruments, by order of the Sirkar. Parade – dismiss!”

George Macdonald Fraser is gone but Harry Paget Flashman lives on and, to borrow one of the best literary catchphrases I've heard, he shall continue to damn the eyes of the impudent!