If writing funny was easy, there would be far more comic novels on the shelves of your local book shop than there are. Compare and contrast the average daily television schedule with those fiction shelves. Television is stacked with stand-up, sitcoms and romantic comedies. Books, not so much. If you don't believe me, try a Google search for 'best humorous novels'. It's thin pickings.
Through my own years of reading I can think of very few novelists who have done it for me. Sue Townsend and Douglas Adams, when I was young, and Tom Sharpe, whose books seemed almost subversive. Evelyn Waugh falls into the category, and Wodehouse, of course. Later in life I came across the great American satirist Carl Hiaasen.
And then there is George MacDonald Fraser and Flashman, the bully he ripped from the pages of Tom Brown's Schooldays and made an unwilling participant in just about every major conflagration of the Victorian age, from the Charge of the Light Brigade to Indian Mutiny and much much more besides.
Flashman, "unregenerate blaggard, bully and coward" according to the writer, is a creation of the very greatest comic genius. MacDonald Fraser picks him up on his expulsion from Rugby School for drunkenness in the 1830s. His father, minor gentry in Leicestershire, buys Harry a commission in the 11th Light Dragoons and one of the most disgraceful, eventful and yet decorated careers in British military history is launched.
Flashman is a charming, handsome, philandering coward with the luck of the devil and the knack of forever being in the wrong place at the wrong time but somehow with the right outcome. Just about his only saving grace - besides his humour - is that Flashman is aware of, and acknowledges, all his faults: the cowardice, mendacity, lechery, cheating and disloyalty.
MacDonald Fraser, a veteran of the Burma campaign in the Second World War and subsequently a journalist and screenwriter, guides Flashman through 12 campaigns, during which he meets Wellington, Bismarck, Queen Victoria ("she always fancied me"), Lincoln, Grant and a host of other statesmen, warriors and characters. And just as remarkable as the consistently well delivered humour is the telling of history.
It's one of my great regrets that I stopped formal study of history at 13. As a result Flashman has been an important source of historical knowledge and the books are renowned for their historical accuracy, even if they are told from a peculiar perspective, and notwithstanding that Flashman obviously wasn't there. And none more so than the first Afghan war and the disastrous retreat from Kabul, detailed in the first novel and which is where Flashman earns his first undeserved laurels, when the usual combination of cowardice and sheer blind luck leaves him the only survivor of the massacre at Piper's Fort. There he is found by the relieving force clutching the flag (in reality trying to surrender it) and is hailed a hero as none of the witnesses of his appalling behaviour is alive to tell the real tale.
And so it goes, in the Crimea with Cardigan and the 600; bound to a cannon at the Siege of Cawnpore; with Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn; fighting pirates with James Brooke in Borneo and holed up in Harper's Ferry with John Brown. Each story is richly told, full of fabulous characters both fictional and historical and with Flashman in the middle, up to no good.
While there are so many moments that are laugh out loud funny, it also was in the first Flashman that I came to appreciate MacDonald Fraser's knack for telling history stories but also the brilliance and fluency of the commentary on the evolving catastrophe, told in the inimitable style of our cowardly hero. The following dissection of the leadership of General Elphinstone (Elphy Bey) in Kabul stood out from the very first:
"I still state unhesitatingly, that for pure, vacillating stupidity, for superb incompetence to command, for ignorance combined with bad judgment - in short, for the true talent for catastrophe - Elphy Bey stood alone. Others abide our question, but Elphy outshines them all as the greatest military idiot of our own or any other day. Only he could have permitted the First Afghan War and let it develop to such ruinous defeat. It was not easy: he started with a good army, a secure position, some excellent officers, a disorganized enemy, and repeated opportunities to save the situation. But Elphy, with the touch of true genius, swept aside these obstacles with unerring precision, and out of order wrought complete chaos. We shall not, with luck, look upon his like again.”
That writing takes some beating. And there are 12 books full of it. They are funny, entertaining, fast-paced and enlightening - and I loved them so much I named a dog for them. There is really nothing like them.