The book also featured Lola Montez, the fabulous beauty of the age, and her lover Ludwig I of Bavaria. Flashy gives the reader the true story, involving Bismarck and the Schleswig-Holstein affair. The idea was that Hope had used Flashman's adventures to invent the tale of Rudolf Rassendyll, the Englishman who was the double of the king of Ruritania. This was a double literary conceit, with Flashman, a character from one Victorian novel, getting involved in the plot of another, Anthony Hope's 1894 classic The Prisoner of Zenda. It was turned down a dozen times before Herbert Jenkins, the small independent house best known for publishing PG Wodehouse, brought it out.įraser followed it the next year with Royal Flash.
It is hard now, with Flashman recognised as an international comic classic, to believe that Fraser had difficulty getting the book published. There were four closely packed pages of notes at the back of the novel which proved the historical accuracy of what seemed like mere exuberant farce. The book was original and very funny, and it also, most unusually for a comic novel, gave readers a telling picture of life in England and the empire between 18. The result was Flashman (1969), which saw the craven Flashy turned into a soldier, quaking with fear but still drinking and chasing women in the midst of the retreat from Kabul in the first Afghanistan war. Fraser was already 44 when he decided to leave his job as deputy editor of the then Glasgow Herald to write fiction, resurrecting Flashman, the cowardly bully of Tom Brown's Schooldays, and telling of his adventures after he had been expelled from Rugby school for drunkenness. George MacDonald Fraser, who has died aged 82, was the creator of Harry Flashman, one of the gems of the English comic novel.
0 kommentar(er)
