In Ur Tom Brown, Revampin’ Ur Villainz!

I like fictional jerkwads, okay? There’s something about an antihero that interests me way more than any hero can. Consider yourself warned.

George Macdonald Fraser’s novel Flashman (and the myriad sequels, though I haven’t yet got my hands on those) is most interesting to readers of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days. The latter is a typically quaint boarding-school novel. The eponymous hero and his plucky chums uphold the virtues of bravery, manliness, and good form at Rugby; their main antagonist is the upperclassman Flashman, who uses his seniority to viciously bully the younger boys. Eventually, Flashman is expelled for drunkenness, and Tom can go on leading his muscular-Christianity life in peace.

While Tom Brown and his lads do seem like jolly good sorts, contemporary readers are often unnerved by their cheerful espousal of morals that now seem dated, hypocritical, and bigoted. There’s no question that these boys are racist, classist, and sexist, but what makes that most uncomfortable for the reader is the fact that the author – a product of his time, of course – seems to want us to view them as ideal heroes. There’s no reason for Tom Brown to question his views; he’s right, and he knows he’s right, and that’s all there is to it. The only bad people are outright bullies like Flashman; anyone who opposes them has the right to be pompous and patronizing, because, well, such people really are superior. We must be in awe of the burden they shoulder in bringing their great moral insight to the rest of the world.

Nothing wrong with reading a novel like that, as long as you consider its historical context and remember that certain among its lessons are no longer acceptable.

Besides, without the original Tom Brown, we’d never have had Fraser’s intriguing counterpoint.

Flashman is a fictional “memoir” beginning where Tom Brown’s School Days leaves off, immediately after his expulsion. After much drinking and whoring, the young Flashman finds himself sent to Afghanistan to fight in the First Anglo-Afghan war of 1839-1842 (thanks, Wikipedia), where he encounters dozens of actual historical figures and, despite being outrageously cowardly and selfish, somehow emerges an acclaimed hero.

Now, Fraser’s Harry Flashman is patently not a hero. If there’s anything thoroughly rotten you can think of, he does it in this book. What emerges is the portrait of a cowardly, selfish scumbag, who uses women, enjoys flogging his servants, and will stop at nothing to better his own situation. Over the course of the story, he rapes an Afghan woman, commits perjury, and wilfully allows his companions to die. He’s racist, chauvinist, homophobic, and classist. But his story is still engaging because he tells it with frank and self-knowing honesty: he’s well aware that he’s a loathsome cad. He fully supports, he informs the reader, people who have morals; it just so happens that he doesn’t share them.

What makes this work is the way Flashman’s narrative showcases the hypocrisy of his time along with his own faults. True, Flashman is a coward, bully, and villain, and he should be punished for his crimes. But, at the same time, it’s hardly his fault that the imperial Victorian society in which he lives, though it professes to honour the Tom Browns of the world, is set up in such a way that it’s actually the Flashmans who rise to the top. Flashman doesn’t expect the reader to sympathize with him; he merely expects the reader to share his views on those who surround him. With our twenty-twenty historical hindsight, that’s easy.

Furthermore, it’s not that Flashman never gets punished: through the course of the novel, he gets nearly as good as he gives. It’s just that the punishment a) seems to have little effect on his personality, and b) doesn’t come from the people in power.

Flashman certainly isn’t for everyone; I wouldn’t put him on my list of favourite fictional characters because he’s not just a jerkface – he’s an out-and-out villain. If you prefer to have to dig for the protagonist’s flaws rather than his virtues, pick up Tom Brown’s School Days instead. But, if you enjoy darkly comic irony – if you don’t mind stories in which the race is hardly ever to the swift nor the battle to the strong – if you like historical novels with a hefty dose of history: well, give Flashman a try.