Review of 'Flash for Freedom! (The Flashman Papers)' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
It's really hard to review this entry in the adventures of Harry Flashman. On the one hand it is researched well enough to make the time and place feel authentic (America in the mid-19th Century), and the various perils and awkward moments confronted by Flashman are some of the best in the series (court room drama, spies, slave ship battles, the underground railroad!) but the racism and rampant sexism are difficult to read.
One of the defining characteristics of the Flashman papers is how Fraser manages to put distance between Harry Flashman and the reader so that we are encouraged to view him as despicable and much of the humor comes from watching how this low character fails upwards. So when it comes to the slave trade a similar distance is created between the reader and that subject. The racist attitudes and "common sense" bigotry of the time period all …
It's really hard to review this entry in the adventures of Harry Flashman. On the one hand it is researched well enough to make the time and place feel authentic (America in the mid-19th Century), and the various perils and awkward moments confronted by Flashman are some of the best in the series (court room drama, spies, slave ship battles, the underground railroad!) but the racism and rampant sexism are difficult to read.
One of the defining characteristics of the Flashman papers is how Fraser manages to put distance between Harry Flashman and the reader so that we are encouraged to view him as despicable and much of the humor comes from watching how this low character fails upwards. So when it comes to the slave trade a similar distance is created between the reader and that subject. The racist attitudes and "common sense" bigotry of the time period all feel accurate. This is how a society engages in justifying slavery, even in the cavalier no big deal racism of our hero.
Fraser's method of exposing the details of the middle passage and the horrendous acts slavers were capable of committing while simultaneously describing Harry Flashman's idiotic moral views walks a very interesting psychological tightrope. By allowing the reader to relax about Flashman's status as a jerk (it is never a question in these novels: he's a jerk) Fraser frees the reader to enjoy the very well written genre elements of the novel. We can rest, assured that slavery in the inhumane details described here are a form of evil and we can come away from an adventure novel with that as a legitimate backdrop without the burden of it being dramatic distance necessary for our protagonist to come. Flashman doesn't really do moral takeaways, ever, but as readers we don't need him to. He can keep on being Flashman while we come away disturbed by the setting he experienced.
