Blog Nº 46
“…I take some pride in the fact that while thrones were toppling and governments melting away overnight, I was heading for home with a set of crown jewels. There’s a moral there, I think, if I could only work out what it was.”
Having previously read and blogged about three Flashman novels that I had in an omnibus volume, I was delighted to revisit one of the most engaging characters in literature in another Flashman adventure, Royal Flash. This is the second novel chronologically in the series and as hoped, our hero Harry Flashman is no less roguish, scoundrelly or cunning than before.
Royal Flash has two sections which take place between 1842 – 43 and 1847 – 88. In the first section, Harry is enjoying being off military duty in London, still surfing on his heroic reputation from his escapades in Afghanistan (which readers of Flashman will know are not quite as they seem to the general public). It is here he has a dalliance with the beautiful Lola Montez and meets the dastardly Otto Von Bismarck.
It is not until section two however that Flashman comes to realise how much he regrets having met Bismarck in the first place. Unwittingly delivered to him in Germany by femme fatale Lola, Flashman needs all his cunning, seductive charm and impressive will to escape in order to extricate himself from a fiendish plot that will ultimately decide the fate of Europe. Flashman takes the reader on an exciting, amusing adventure through the dungeons and throne-rooms of Europe, engaging in swordplay, amours, disguise and deceit to escape his desperate situation and return to London.
With the risk of sounding like a broken record, the Flashman novels are magic because of the Harry Flashman character himself. A self-confessed coward and rascal keeping up the façade of a brave, respectful British Officer, in his memoirs he is unapologetically honest about his escapades and how he is always looking out for himself above all else. He is witty and refreshingly blunt to the reader, but always manages to maintain a heroic image to his unsuspecting foes. You can’t help but like him, and paradoxically he often ends up being the hero people think he is because the situations he finds himself in require courage to escape, even though like his enemies he is never averse to using underhand tactics, treachery and cunning to do so.
Royal Flash is a rollicking adventure across the continent, and once again George MacDonald Fraser has seamlessly integrated our fictional hero into real historical events with real characters, making you wish Flashy really had locked horns with the likes of Bismarck.
Happy reading,
Imo x
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