R.I.P.

[pellegrina]

On New Year's Eve, eyeballing the Waterstone's display, I decided for the fourth time to try getting into the Flashman books, since everyone has raved about them for as long as I can remember. (Previous attempts have faltered on a younger more prudish me damning the protagonist as a male chauvinist pig, an obsessive-compulsive need to have read Tom

Comments

[pellegrina]

Let's just say: hope that I never support your sports team (if you have one). I jinx every team I support except the Azzurri once every 24 years. malaheed used to scoff, but even he has noticed over the years how I need only walk into the room for the other side to score.

Darn, I forgot to fix and upload the Tardelli usericon philmophlegm so kindly made for me.

That said, I am beginning to enjoy Flashman on the basis of one commute's reading. In Fraser's hands he is all that you say (except possibly constipated), but he admits it freely and also admits his comeuppances without self-justification. So far (p. 33) it works.

[friend_of_tofu]

Blimey!

I've never got on with the Flashman books, though my mum adores them. She will be sad to hear that GMF has kicked the bucket.

However, in fairness, I've never really read them as being in favour of Flash's all-round chauvinism, more that he is used as a device to show the nasty underbelly of the Upstanding British Gentleman. I have no doubt that GMF's Flashman is very accurately a man of his time, and that is rightly revolting. Much of the humour seems to derive from Flash's following his penis into trouble, or so it seems, not to mention the way he underestimates his stupid colonial opponents.

I suspected when young that the books, particularly the covers used when I was a kid, were a deliberate attempt to have a pop at James Bond and his ilk. Which inclines me to like the whole affair more.

[malaheed]

In case it isnt co-incidence, can you start reading Jeffery Archer

[anonymous]

Extremely bad news about GMF.

Do all of your friends limit their reading to novels whose heroes fit their moral stereotypes? It does rather seem to miss the point of Flashman: his behaviour is merely comic device. One isn't supposed to approve.

Worth reading them in order - the Flashman novels - if at all possible. The two set in the US don't really work read out of sync.

[pellegrina]

You'd have to ask my friends ;-)

Do you mean read them in order by internal chronology or order of writing/publication? Though I'd be surprised if GMF had published the two US ones in an order that wouldn't work, so I suppose either will do.

Anyway (as surely you know if you know me, even through this limited medium!) I am way too OCD ever to read a series out of order. Remember I originally felt obliged to read Tom Brown's Schooldays first - it's only the TV production a few years ago that allowed me to skip it this time...