I have to admit to a rather striking failure with this essay defending, after a fashion, George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels from its (real and possible) critics. If the commenters are any guide, I quite failed to make it clear that I love and admire the books. I wanted to make a case for taking them seriously, as subtle and morally serious treatments of British imperial history that evoke and suggest considerably more than were admitted to either their narrator (the cad, bully and coward Flashman) or his creator (listen, if you dare, to his second appearance on Desert Island Discs). Alas, most readers seem to have taken me either to be defending precisely the anti-Flashman position I was challenging, or, simply to be overcomplicating what should be a simple matter. It’s a sufficiently fundamental misunderstanding that the fault must be mine.
The puzzle about the Flashman books is that they are so evidently full of an ambivalence about imperial history that their author ostentatiously refused to acknowledge, and an acuteness of moral vision their author mocked his readers for seeing in him. I wrote in the essay that
Like other unreliable narrators, Flashman’s words — to echo John Lanchester on . . . Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library — are “darkened by the pressure of another possible reading, a reading which has a deeper vision of life than the narrator’s”. In Flashman in the Great Game, set during what colonial sources used to call the Indian ‘mutiny’ of 1857, Flashman briefly sets down the final moments in the life of a British riding-master, who has just been struck down by Indian cavalrymen he once trained himself. The old man is neither indignant nor self-pitying. Flashman informs us that he coughed blood, and his voice trailed away into a whisper. “They shaped well, though…didn’t they…shape well? My Bengalis…” He closed his eyes. “I thought they shaped…uncommon well…” The so-called mutineers are heroes, skilled fighters in a cause they see as just; but so too are the men they had, until recently, obeyed without question, decent men who did their jobs honourably, failing only — like most people — to think hard enough about the system that made it all possible. It is possible to be wholly on the side of the “Bengali” rebels and still find these dying words both intelligible and moving. . . . There is more in the Flashman stories than even their author was willing, or able, to admit.
I was quoting from John Lanchester’s review of Hollinghurst’s book in the LRB in 1998, one of a handful of pieces of criticism I return to again and again. The whole paragraph is worth quoting:
. . . much of what Will [Beckwith] says seems to be darkened by the pressure of another possible reading, a reading which has a deeper vision of life than the narrator’s. ‘It was all very clean,’ he remarks of [a certain] lavatory . . ., ‘and at several of the stalls under the burnished copper pipes (to which someone must attach all their pride), men were standing, raincoats shrouding from the innocent visitor or the suspicious policeman their hour-long footlings.’ The observation about the pipes is a typical piece of Beckwithian aestheticism, an instance of the ‘camp, exploitative, ironical control’ of his expression: how amusing that some troglodyte should spend his days cleaning the Gents. But there is, at the same time, a kind of latent compassion and humanity about realising that lavatory fittings don’t get that clean just by accident, and in realising that someone’s life must therefore be entirely bound up in keeping them that way. You are fleetingly led to wonder, as Beckwith clearly does not, what that would be like if it were your life.
The double focus – operating in that moment of an observation which is both Will’s and more than Will’s – becomes increasingly important as the novel progresses. Where there is a darkening and enriching of the words Will speaks, it usually derives from the sense that those words have an ethical dimension of which he is not fully aware. As the story moves along and the various forms of idealism it depicts (emotional, aesthetic, erotic, familial) turn sour, the ethical dimension presses on the reader more and more. . . . It isn’t quite clear how far the events of The Swimming-Pool Library lead Will to realise the limitations of his own behaviour and world-view. For the reader, those limitations could not be made clearer (though it is a novel that is bound to attract galumphing misreadings and denunciation).
I struck a more purely celebratory note in a feature I did last year for the Telegraph to mark the hundredth anniversary of the literary début of Captain W. E. Johns, the author of the much-loved, much-parodied Biggles books. I don’t think that essay had any thoughts worth quoting again, so I’ll direct you instead to an intelligent appreciation of the books from an unlikely quarter: Hilary Mantel’s 2009 Guardian essay on Biggles.
The essay on Flashman was written with half an eye to a possible collection of essays – should anyone be reckless enough to want to publish one on this subject – about ethically and/or politically dubious works of popular fiction. Flashman will be in it of course, as will Biggles. That’s a volume in which I might also include probably the most popular thing I’ve ever written, this 2016 essay for Aeon about Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers novels, set in a girls’ boarding school in the 1940s and 50s (I did not approve the dreadful title).
Re-reading the essay with the natural embarrassment one feels at the outpourings of a younger self, I see in it another instance of something I also did in the Flashman essay: to try to bring out the literary qualities of a popular writer by comparing him or her to one more obviously literary.
The wages of sin at Malory Towers is solitude. The girls’ most effective rebuke to egotism gone wild is, in a wonderfully medieval-sounding phrase, to be ‘sent to Coventry’. No one will talk to her until she has found her way back into a recognition of what it means to be one girl among others, all equally real. An instinctive, untheoretical moralist, Blyton would never have put it quite this way. I borrow the phrasing from Iris Murdoch, a novelist and philosopher who wrote for grown-ups. . . . Time and again, the girls must be brought to their lowest ebb before a glimpse of self-knowledge and the chance to get back on their moral feet ‘Love,’ Murdoch wrote in an essay called ‘The Sublime and the Good’ (1959), is ‘the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.’ At various points in her school career, Darrell feels this difficulty. Told by her friend Sally that: ‘All you do is put yourself into the place of the other person, and feel like them … That sounds muddled – but I can’t very well say exactly what I mean. I haven’t the words,’ Darrell responds: ‘Oh, I know what you mean, all right! … get into somebody else’s skin … But I’m too impatient to do that. I’m too tightly in my own skin!’ The schoolgirl’s hell is not, as a character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit (1944) memorably puts it, other people; her hell is the isolated self, incapable of getting outside itself. Time and again, the girls must be brought to their lowest ebb (ostracism, betrayal, near-fatal illness or, worse, near-expulsion) before they are offered a glimpse of self-knowledge and the chance to get back on their moral feet. Sometimes an apology will do it, or an acknowledgement, or some gesture of recompense to those harmed. But Blyton, like life, can be brutal: not every character is redeemed by the end of the series, and no character is straightforwardly rid of her vices. There is only the lifelong challenge of acknowledging the reality of other people.