A Bastard’s Safari: ‘Flashman and The Redskins’ (George MacDonald Fraser, 1982)

Flashman and the Redskins, George MacDonald Fraser (1982)

Have ever wanted to read about someone bad? Not an antihero. Not a lovable rogue. Nor even a protagonist with a grey, undefined moral compass. I mean someone really, really bad. A distinctly, willingly, immoral man. A character that despite his charm and humour (and often because of it), could be said to be actively evil if he had any morality beyond personal debauchery. 

Enter Harry Flashman. A Victorian cad who finds himself unwillingly and unwittingly traversing the American West in 1849 – and then again in 1876.

Flashman and the Redskins is an installment of the Flashman Papers. This series follows Harry Flashman, a repurposed villain from the Victorian novel Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes. The Flashman Papers are presented as rediscovered memoirs of the eponymous villain—a cowardly trickster with innate skills in languages and seduction. In Redskins, Flashman finds himself mingling with Apaches, the Glanton gang, Sioux, traveling brothels, and the US army. He is fleeing often as not, seducing as he goes and bumbling his way into many key events and figures of the American Indian Wars.

This was an intensely entertaining novel, boyish and pithy with the odd moment of heart and shock. Historically too, it manages to add a fairly accurate human perspective for the era. The memoir style is written with enough upper class Victorian idiosyncrasy to add flavour without going over the top. Tonally it has that slightly self-abashed vernacular so common in British comedy novels—tinged with a hearty stream of slurs and racial epithets.

When I first wrote this review, I found myself trying to justify laughing at a novel about the absurdity, cruelty, and tragedy of manifest destiny . Flashman, after all, witnesses (and participates in) some abhorrent acts—He rides with scalp hunters, transports sex slaves, and marries into a Chiricahua band with a penchant for torturing civilians. Yet all my justifications came off either as preening or never quite right.

There is, I concluded, no way to discuss such brutal history with any levity that does not have a bastard such as Flashman as a narrator. In doing away with the viewpoint moralizing, Flashman in fact paints a relatively nuanced and uninvolved picture of the events. He can only do so because he does not care. What makes Flashmans presentation of the American Indian Wars so interesting is that its relayed by a character who has no stake in the many historical drama’s he is forced into (he’s English, after all). Lust and self preservation are his only designs. As a result, Flashmans own rich and diabolical worldview still functions as an impartial canvas for the reader to enjoy a sarcastic and cynical safari throughout history upon. In his own words:

“I don’t condone it, and I don’t condemn it, either. It happened, just as the tide comes in…when selfish frightened men—in other words, any men, red or white, civilized or savage—come face to face in the middle of a wilderness that both of ‘em want, the lord alone knows why but war breaks out and the weaker goes under. [Politics] don’t matter a spent piss!”

Flashman and the Redskins provides a wicked guide to take us through an interesting and unfamiliar time, but little commentary upon it.