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George MacDonald Fraser

Jan 10th 2008

From The Economist print edition

George MacDonald Fraser, inventor of Flashman, died on January 2nd, aged 82

HARRY FLASHMAN never knew George MacDonald Fraser. That was a pity, because Mr Fraser knew every scrap about Flashman, from the points of his swaggering moustaches to the tips of his gleaming spurs.

He knew him as a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward and, not least, a toady, ever able to make himself shine in the eyes of his braying superiors. And he revelled in him as perhaps the finest fictional rogue ever to grace the map of the British empire.

Mr Fraser had known him from the start of his career, when he was dragged bragging and hiccupping from the pages of “Tom Brown's Schooldays” and pitchforked out of Rugby; and he had followed him, like some devoted batman, through all his military campaigns, from Afghanistan to South Africa to the Indian wars. He had seen him frozen in a blanket in a corpse-strewn defile on the retreat from Kabul in 1842;

almost split neatly in two by a grinning Chinaman in a top-knot while running guns down the Yangtse in 1860; struggling in an Indian swamp, after the great ghat massacre at Cawnpore, with what looked like man-eating crocodiles; and charging, by accident, for the Russian guns at Balaclava. As Flashman accumulated the tinware—the Victoria Cross, the Queen's Medal, the San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth (“richly deserved”), both he and Mr Fraser knew it was sheer terror that propelled him, delirium funkens, plus a large measure of luck. The great hero of Jallalabad was, in fact, “yellow as yesterday's custard”. But he always emerged in splendour.

And with women. Every Flashman novel writhed with them, preferably all bum, belly and bust, giggling and bouncing at the prospect of an officer “who had raked and ridden harder than most”. After the beauteous Fetnab (who “knew the ninety-seven ways of love...though...the seventy-fourth position turns out to be the same as the seventy-third, but with your fingers crossed”), came Lola Montez and Cassie and Susie the Bawd; and, finest of all, the Indian princess Lakshmibai, her “splendid golden nakedness”

dressed in no more than bangles and a tiny veil. It was a serious disaster that could interrupt the tumbling for any long period of time.

was sure there was little glory in war. Fighting was a job to be done, often reluctantly, with simple application and dogged common sense. As for the military virtues, “the best thing you can do with 'em is hang them on the wall in Bedlam.”

This was why there was no man better than Mr Fraser to stumble on the Flashman story. It began with his “discovery”, in 1965, of a batch of memoirs wrapped in oilskins and packed in a tea-chest in Ashby- de-la-Zouch, in Leicestershire. The first Flashman novel, written in a feverish 90 hours to get him out of a financial hole, was followed by 11 others and could have led to more, for Mr Fraser had never got started on the American Civil War. He brought his journalist's and historian's eye to bear on the “papers”, adding footnotes to correct Flashman's Arabic, adjust his dates and allow for possible unfairness to the fools and incompetents who commanded him. Generally, however, he found Flashman an impressively accurate observer. Between them they made the stories so good that some Americans thought they were real.

Would Flashman have liked him, had they met? Mr Fraser was a Scot, of course, solidly and loudly so, and Flashman had no love for Scotland. He found it (on his visits to Balmoral to the girlish Queen Victoria, all popeyes and buck teeth but “pretty enough beneath the neck”) a place of gloom and drizzle and long-faced holiness. He preferred Indian heat and sun. But Mr Fraser was a devoted son of the borders, born in Carlisle and writing both fact and fiction about the ruffian-reivers and cattle-stealers of the region: men who, in their shameless venturing and whoring and disrespect for law, were quite a lot like old Flashy, except that they were brave.

Flashman's more blatant chauvinism (“I pulled her across my knees and smartened her up with my riding switch”) and his racism (jabbering blacks and lounging sepoys would soon feel the smart of his rifle) were sometimes laid at Mr Fraser's door. But his own views were more moderately right-wing, extending to a liking for law and order and a horror of the metric system. And though he and Flashman between them seemed intent on savagely satirising the whole British imperial enterprise, the truth was more complicated. The novels illustrated both the folly of war and the unsung, unregarded heroism of the lower orders, the actual builders of the empire. In their sharp-sightedness, if not much else, here were two men who could clasp each other appreciatively by the hand.

Overview

Jan 10th 2008

From The Economist print edition

The unemployment rate in America jumped from 4.7% to 5% in December. American employers, excluding farms, added just 18,000 workers to their payrolls in December, the smallest increase since August 2003. Government hiring more than accounted for the rise: private-sector payrolls fell by 13,000.

Existing-home sales that are agreed on, but not yet completed, fell by 2.6% in November, after a 3.7%

rise in October.

The euro zone's high inflation persisted at the end of last year. Consumer prices rose by 3.1% in the year to December, the same rate as in November, according to provisional figures. The average inflation in 2007 was 2.1%, just above the European Central Bank's desired 2% ceiling. The currency zone's unemployment rate was stable, at 7.2% in November. GDP rose by 0.8% in the third quarter, fractionally revised up.

In Britain the number of mortgages advanced for home purchases fell to 83,000 in November, the lowest total since January 2005 and more than a third below the level a year earlier.

Mexico's core measure of consumer prices, which excludes fresh-food and energy costs, rose by 4% in the year to December, the highest 12-month rise since May 2002.

The outlook for 2008 is still darkening, according to The Economist's monthly poll of economists (see article). Forecasts for GDP growth in America and the euro area were written back again this month.

Worryingly, inflation forecasts are moving in the opposite direction.

Output, prices and jobs

Jan 10th 2008

From The Economist print edition

The Economist commodity-price index

Jan 10th 2008

From The Economist print edition

The Economist poll of forecasters, January averages

Jan 10th 2008

From The Economist print edition

Trade, exchange rates, budget balances and interest rates

Jan 10th 2008

From The Economist print edition

Markets

Jan 10th 2008

From The Economist print edition

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