Crazy About… George MacDonald Fraser
June 28, 2008
Crazy about...
George MacDonald Fraser
Specifically the Flashman books, Fraser's masterwork.
The Flashman books are not romances. They are adventures. If the Lymond Chronicles can be described as the story of a Tudor mercenary, then the Flashman books are the story of a Victorian soldier.
The books purport to be a series of "packets discovered in a Leicestershire saleroom in 1966" where Flashman tells the true story of his life, as opposed to the sanitised "Dawns and Departures of a Soldier's Life" which is his public face. An editor is assigned to the books, and he adds copious footnotes, some of them disapproving of Flashman's behaviour and some elaborating on the many historical events Flashman throws out casually. After all, they were part of his life, not History. Occasionally his censorious sister-in-law, Grizel, has taken a hand too, but her main contributions are to criticise his scandalous behaviour.
The published books dot about in time, as they depend on when the ‘packets' are opened so this is one series that doesn't have to be read in order. Once you've read the first book, "Flashman," you can pick the next one that takes your fancy.
Of course, all of these people are Fraser, although people have been known to take the series at face value. When the series came out in the States, several reviewers took the books at face value, as genuine memoirs, which delighted the author no end.
Reading Victorian history through the eyes of Flashman is an exhilarating ride, and he never puts on the brakes. From the battlefields of Europe and India to life on the slave ships and with the Apache, he never stops. And be warned - there is absolutely nothing of the politically correct in these books, any more than there was in the Victorian age. Suck it up.
When Fraser was asked about political incorrectness he said, "I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn't present the picture they would like.
My forebears from the Highlands of Scotland were a fairly primitive, treacherous, blood-thirsty bunch and, as Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, would have been none the worse for washing. Fine, let them be so depicted, if any film maker feels like it; better that than insulting, inaccurate drivel like Braveheart."
In the books, Flashman describes himself as a bully and a cad, but there is so much more to him than that. He's intelligent, something he considers a curse, as when the Army discovers it, some highly dangerous covert operations come his way, and above all, he's honest. Brutally honest. Not everything he does is admirable - no romance hero, our Flashy - but he recounts it in raw detail, along with the exploits of the people around him which are often no better and frequently worse than his.
Flashy has no illusions. He is the bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays, and the only reason to read that awful book about the sanctimonious Victorian attitude to "play the game against the odds" which helped to lose the British Empire. Flashy is sent home in disgrace, is seduced by his father's mistress, is sent to Scotland where he meets his amazing wife Elspeth (which doesn't stop either of them playing away from home, but they remain sincerely in love) and then joins the army.
That's just the start. Adventures in Afghanistan, the Crimea, the Old West, the Deep South, the Indian Mutiny, Imperial China (where he becomes the Empress's favourite) follow on a breathtaking ride through the nineteenth century.
And these books are funny. I have never read a funnier sex scene than the Duchess Irma's wedding night in "Royal Flash" (which wickedly parodies the "Prisoner of Zenda" and features Bismarck in the Rudy role). Through it all Flashy ruthlessly describes his less-than-heroic exploits which tend to end with him coming up smelling of roses. You have to read these. They're a palate-cleanser after an angsty romance, a ride you'll never forget, and an amazing example of how to write a pinpoint accurate historical novel without making it read like a text book.Just a taster - this is from "Flashman at the Charge" where Flashman is stuck with a German royal prince, trying to keep him out of trouble in London. Prince Willy wants to pop his cherry:
"I couldn't budge him. So in the end I decided to let him have his way, and make sure there were no snags, and that it was done safe and quiet. I took him off to a very high-priced place I knew in St. John's wood, swore the old bawd to secrecy, and stated the randy little pig's requirements. She did him proud, too, with a strapping blonde wench--satin boots and all--and at the sight of her Willy moaned feverishly and pointed, quivering, like a setter. He was trying to clamber all over her almost before the door closed, and of course he made a fearful mess of it, thrashing away like a stoat in a sack, and getting nowhere. It made me quite sentimental to watch him--reminded me of my own ardent youth, when every coupling began with an eager stagger across the floor trying to disentangle one's breeches from one's ankles."
Go thou and read.
Tags: Crazy About, Flashman Books, George MacDonald Fraser, Lynne ConnollyCrazy about…Francis Crawford of Lymond
May 30, 2008
At one point in my life, I decided to give up working for a while and have babies with my husband. That entailed selling my house in Banbury, moving up to Manchester and changing all the boring legal stuff, house titles, insurance documents. You get the picture. Tedious stuff.
That was when I discovered Dorothy Dunnett. I had come across her name before, but when I tried the first book in the Lymond Chronicles, "The Game of Kings," I couldn't get through it. It is difficult, dense reading, but it was the first book she ever wrote, and it's worth struggling through it because there is a feast waiting for you.
I raced through the six books of the Chronicles and when I finished, I started again.
Dunnett writes like nobody else I've ever come across. Her central character, the Scottish Francis Crawford of Lymond, is seen by his family, friends and enemies. You rarely get a passage in Lymond's point of view. But you will never read a more lively, exciting, sexy or dangerous man anywhere else. "Lymond, the only hero you'll ever need."
He's a musician, a poet, a mathematician and one of the best fighting men of his age. He's an adventurer, and a planner, handsome and lethal. You will never forget him, I guarantee it.
The books are set in the first part of the sixteenth century, and the settings range from Scotland, to France, Turkey, Malta, England, Russia and everywhere in between. She depicts the Regent of France, Mary of Guise, Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth Tudor, Ivan the Terrible and countless others, as well as her own brilliant creations, who meld seamlessly with the historical characters.
Her style is rich, full of references, some obscure ones but you don't have to know them to enjoy the books. Read it through fast the first time, then you can have a leisurely read, and enjoy the language.
Examples:
Lucent and delicate, Drama entered, mincing like a cat
Lymond to Christian Stewart
'This of course, is the chamber of devils, who sit in hexagon babbling like herring gulls about the ruin of charity and the disorderly rupture of souls...
Christian to Lymond
'I am an architect in lexicography; I can build you a palace of adverbs and a hermitage of personal pronouns...
The building, always derelict, had a sullen air, as if in the emptying the last, lingering kindness had been wrung from the stones.
Lymond sat in the broken hall, and by him stood Johnnie Bullo...
Will Scott stalked forward prepared to get full value from the wrath boiling in his veins, and met the wall of Lymond at his worst.
When you first meet Lymond, he is entering Scotland illegally, a convicted felon who has just spent four years on the galleys. Then after half-killing an official, he sets fire to his mother's castle - with his mother still in it.
At this point, you're hating him, I can almost guarantee it. But have faith - there is reason in everything he does, good reason. And Lymond's story is told by some of the most vivid, most interesting and sympathetic characters you will ever meet anywhere. The blind but far from helpless Christian Stewart, who understands him as few other people do. His brother Richard, Baron (later Earl) Culter. His mother, the sainted Sybilla - or is she?
By the end of the first book, you are with Lymond for the rest of his journey. You think you understand him, but then you're plunged into the middle of French court intrigue, and after that, you meet Lymond's deadly enemy Gabriel, the beautiful man who seduces everyone except Francis to his cause. By then you trust him.
And let's not forget the action. The first book, "The Game of Kings" has the best sword fight I've ever read - and I've read "The Count of Monte Cristo," "Dr. Syn" and "Scaramouche." The rooftop race, the escape across the desert and the various battles Lymond takes part in are vivid and exciting. The romance, and there is more than one, is breathtaking.
Historical accuracy? It almost goes without saying. Lady Dunnett thoroughly absorbed her research and then she wrote. You live and breathe the sixteenth century while you read these books, the Europe of Henry VIII and the corrupt French court, the Russia of Ivan the Terrible, the Far East of the Ottoman court at its height.
Get the books. Read them. Don't give up at the start, get through that first book and then sit back and hold on. You're in for one hell of a ride.
The Lymond Chronicles are:
The Game of Kings
Queen's Play
The Disorderly Knights
Pawn in Frankincense
The Ringed Castle
Checkmate.
And here's how it all starts:
"Lymond is back."
It was known soon after the Sea-Catte reached Scotland from Campvere with an illicit cargo and a man she should not have carried.
"Lymond is in Scotland."
It was said by busy men preparing for war against England, with contempt, with disgust; with a side-slipping look at one of their number. "I hear the Lord Culter's young brother is back." Only sometimes a woman's voice would say it with a different note, and then laugh a little.
Lymond's own men had known he was coming. Waiting for him in Edinburgh they wondered briefly, without concern, how he proposed to penetrate a walled city to reach them.
I'm always hearing "Oh yes, I keep meaning to read those." Don't put it off any longer. You can't afford to. Tomorrow you might get knocked down by a bus, and it would be a real tragedy if you hadn't read The Lymond Chronicles first.
Crazy About: Georgette Heyer
May 23, 2008
From our ducktastic friend, Lynne Connolly:
There are three writers whose complete works are permanently on my TBR shelf, and always will be. Not the classics, but writers I discovered all by myself and then followed slavishly until they died. Yes, sadly, they're all dead. So I'll start with the one who died furthest ago. Georgette Heyer.
The Divine Georgette was the only begetter of the Regency genre. She wrote about the Regency when our grandmothers were young or not even thought of and she's never been out of print since her first book came out. How's that for longevity?
Heyer started by writing in several genres, historical, contemporary and detective. She dropped the contemporaries, even had them suppressed (they're okay, but nothing special), but kept on with the historicals and the detectives.
Her first historicals were less-than-accurate Georgians. We've all read the romance which could have been set in any period, the details so weird and wonderful that it turns into a guess-the-era festival. Well the early Heyers were a bit like that. Swashbuckling, adventurous, lots of fun. And in These Old Shades, she took the May/December romance further than I found comfortable. Her heroine is legal, but she behaves like a spoiled teenager and her hero is the jaded roué, the Duke of Avon. But people love and adore this book, even now.
I started to love Heyer when I read her first Regency, Regency Buck. Not her most successful book, and one that has one of the most slappable heroines in all romancelandia, but I loved it, drank it up. You see Heyer has that indefinable something - she has a unique and special voice. You can read Heyer in modern writers now, not least because she planted traps for people who dared to copy her. One of the things Heyer is famous for is her slang, but most of it is authentic to the Regency era - except for a few. "Making a cake of oneself" is usually accepted as one of her bombs. Read that in a book and you can be sure that the writer is a Heyerite. She always claimed it was authentic, but nobody has found the source.
In Heyer, you will find every kind of Regency hero and she wrote the originals of all the heroes that came after. And then some. We don't often find the gentle, unassuming hero in modern Regencies, but we had the delightful Gilly in The Quiet Gentleman. There is the war hero, unknown by his relatives in The Unknown Ajax, the haughty aristocrat brought low by a lively family in Frederica, the Regency leader of fashion in Arabella and the nabob, self-made man in Black Sheep. The rake? The absolute pattern-card, the ultimate rake is Damerel, the hero of Venetia, probably my favourite Heyer.
There are so many Regency rakes now, that it's hard to realise that he didn't originate until Damerel strode across the field, disentangled Venetia from the briars and stole a kiss. Then, when he discovered she wasn't the village girl he imagined, he laughed. And was enchanted when Venetia didn't storm off in high dudgeon, but shared the joke with him. They spend the book falling in love and when Damerel forces her to give him up, we're as devastated as Venetia. But hey, it's a romance and yes, Venetia forces matters and she gets her man. Feisty heroine, sexy, powerful hero. Told with wit and aplomb, it's irresistible.
Take this bit from the proposal scene in Venetia for great conversation and the most delicious sexual tension imaginable:
"You'd know about my orgies!" objected Damarel.
"Yes, but I shouldn't care about them once in a while. After all, it would be quite unreasonable to wish you to change all your habits, and I can always retire to bed, can't I?"
"Oh, won't you preside over them?" he said, much disappointed.
"Yes, love, if you wish me to," she replied, smiling at him. "Should I enjoy them?"
He stretched out his hand, and when she laid her own in it, held it very tightly. "You shall have a splendid orgy, my dear delight, and you will enjoy it very much indeed!"
Pause for happy sigh.
You've read it before in other books? I daresay you have, but Heyer wrote it first.
She had two hero types, she claimed, the A and the B (can we say alpha and beta?) but she does herself a disservice, as she did so often. Her heroes are memorable and very different to each other. Meet them in a ballroom (please!) and you'd know which was which without having to learn their names.
I don't write Regencies very often because for me, Heyer did it all. I did want to see the characters in bed, and Heyer, being a woman of her era, couldn't take them into the bedroom, but when I start to write Regency, I tend to channel Heyer. So I write in my beloved Georgian era instead, where I can see the age without the filter of an author who always dominated the field.
Tags: Crazy About, Georgette Heyer
