Mr American by George MacDonald Fraser

(Book Review)

Why I Read This Book

          After finishing the Flashman series (for all my Flashman reviews see here), I decided I might as well knock this book off too.

            This book is not officially part of the Flashman series, but it’s by the same author, and Flashman is one of the characters.  (I had previously characterized Flashman’s role in this book as a cameo, but after having read the book, I think Flashman plays a big enough role that it is safe to call him one of the supporting characters.)

The Review

          Not at all what I expected, but a wonderful book nonetheless.

            I imagine that, like me, many people track down and read this book solely because of the Flashman connection.  So it’s a little bit of a surprise to discover how unlike the Flashman series this book actually is.

            The Flashman books were fast paced, often adventurous or humorous, always irreverent, mostly exotic, with lots of scandalous liaisons with foreign women and grizzly deaths.  In other words: they’re pretty low brow.

            This book, by contrast, is much more serious. 

           

            But the biggest difference between this and the regular Flashman series is the pacing.  Flashman usually moved at a pretty fast clip from one disaster to another.  This book is intent on taking its time. 

            The slow pace of the book, and the in depth, blow by blow description of old fashioned aristocratic parties and social gatherings, reminded me a lot of War and Peace.

            I know, it’s probably sacrilege to compare a Flashman book to War and Peace. And yet it strikes me that even if the two books are dissimilar in talent, they are at least similar in ambition.

            In both books, the plot is only of secondary importance.  The real purpose, in both books, is to describe, in as much detail as possible, all the aspects of life during a certain time period.

            Both authors were removed from their subject material by roughly the same amount of time.  (Tolstoy was writing in 1869 to describe Russia in the early 1800s, Fraser was writing in 1980 to describe England in the early 1900s.)  And consequently, both were trying to describe a period that had only just gone out of living memory.

            Fraser is intent on recreating as much of Edwardian England as is possible within the pages of his book.  He recreates everything from the local taverns, to the political discussions, to the streets of London, to the aristocratic parties, to the theater, to the cab drivers.

            As with War and Peace, the key to enjoying this book is be in the right frame of mind.  If you start to get impatient, you’re going to hate this book.  But if you just allow yourself to get absorbed in all the period details, you’ll love this book.

            The good news is that George MacDonald Fraser pulls the thing off.  Like Tolstoy in War and Peace, Fraser accomplishes his recreation of the past not with long boring descriptions, but by recreating scenes of life.  And he does it well.

            For example in one section Fraser spends 30 pages just describing a party.  I know that sounds pretty boring, but when you actually read those pages, it’s not boring at all.  In fact I was glued to those pages as I read them.  (I’m usually a pretty slow reader, but I got completely absorbed in this book and couldn’t put it down.)

            Although I thoroughly enjoyed the Flashman series, this is a whole different side of Fraser, and it’s apparent he was much more talented as a writer than I had previously given him credit for.

            It’s always difficult to dissect good prose and determine what exactly makes it work (especially for us non-literary types), but whatever it is, Fraser has it.

            The style of the book is probably best illustrated with an excerpt.  This is from page 14-16, just after Mr. Franklin has gotten off the boat at Liverpool:

            Once outside the Customs shed, Mr Franklin paused to examine the railway timetable board; there were, he saw, five companies competing to carry him to London on Monday. After some deliberation, he decided on London and North-western, which undertook to convey him to Euston in something over four hours, via Crewe and Rugby, for 29 shillings first-class. Just under six dollars, in fact. It was the fastest train, not that that could matter to a man who had not taken the special vestibuled boat-train for Atlantic passengers which was even now pulling out of Riverside Station with a shrilling of steam.

            His porter was waiting at the cab rank, and on his inquiring whether the gentleman wish to travel by taxi or horse cab, Mr Franklin fixed him with a thoughtful grey eye and asked what the fare might be.

            “Cab’s a shillin’ a mile, taxi’s sixpence a half-mile an’ twopence every sixth of a mile after that,” replied the porter.

            “And how far is the Adelphi Hotel?” asked Mr Franklin.

            This innocent question caused some consternation among the taxi-men and cab drivers; some thought it would be about a mile, if not slightly more, but there was a school of thought that held it was a bare mile by the shortest route. No one knew for certain, and finally the porter, a practical man who wanted to get back to the Customs shed for another client, settled the matter by spitting and declaring emphatically:

            “It’ll cost you a shillin’ anyways.”

            Mr Franklin nodded judiciously, indicated a horse-cab, and then paid the porter. He seemed to be having some difficulty with the massive British copper coins, to which he was plainly unaccustomed, and the tiny silver “doll’s-eye” threepence which he eventually bestowed; the porter sighed and reflected that this was a damned queer Yank; most of them scattered their money like water.

            This was not lost on the cabby, who mentally abandoned the notion of suggesting that he take his passenger by way of Rodney Street—which would have added at least sixpence to the fare—there to gaze on Number 62, the birthplace of the late Mr Gladstone. Americans, in his experience, loved to see the sights, and would exclaim at the Grand Old Man’s childhood home and add as much as a shilling to the tip. An even better bet was the house in Brunswick Street where Nathaniel Hawthorne had kept his office as U.S. Consul in the middle of the previous century, but somehow, the cabby reflected morosely, this particular American didn’t look as though he’d be interested in the author of Tanglewood and the Scarlet Letter either.

            The cab drew out of the quayside gates and up the long pier to the main street at the top, where the electric trams clanged and rumbled and a slow-moving stream of traffic, most of it horse-drawn, but with the occasional motor here and there, slowed the cab to a walk.  The cabby noted that his fare was sitting forward, surveying the scene with the air of a man who is intent on drinking everything in, but giving no sign of whether he found it pleasing or otherwise. For the cabby’s money, central Liverpool was not an inspiring sight in any weather, with its bustling pavements and dirty over-crowded streets and he was genuinely startled when after some little distance his passenger called out sharply to him to hold on. He was staring intently down the street which they were crossing, a long, grimy thoroughfare of chandlers’ shops and warehouses; he was smiling, the wondering cabby noticed, in a strange, faraway fashion, as though seeing something that wasn’t there at all.  He was humming, too, gently under his breath, as he surveyed the long seedy stretch of ugly buildings and cobbles on which the rain was beginning to fall.

            The book is heavy on description, but it’s never too much.  There’s just the right amount of eye for detail that absorbs you in the scene without losing momentum entirely.

            And although it’s not evident in the section I quoted above, there’s also a lot of dialogue in this book.  Much of the dialogue has little bearing on the plot, but the characters are fun to listen to, and the dialogue does serve the purpose of creating the scene.  Every so often a couple of important plot points are dropped into the dialogue to pique your interest a little bit more, but then once the plot is hinted at, the dialogue will go off in another direction, and the plot of this novel is only gradually revealed. 

            Because the book is heavy on description and dialogue, there isn’t much plot in this 585 page book. But what little plot there is, is teased out only gradually, and part of the pleasure of reading this book is to have the plot gradually revealed. Knowing too  much of the plot in advance would spoil the book, so for that reason I’ll carry on  further discussion about the plot below the spoiler warning.

SPOILERS (and other observations)

* Given that the tone of this book is completely different than the Flashman series, I suppose the usual detailed Flashman footnotes would have spoiled everything.  The footnotes would have taken you out of the story, and Fraser has done so much work to absorb you into the setting.

            But that being said, I kind of missed the footnotes a little bit.  In the Flashman books, Fraser always let you know how much of the story was based on real history, and what his sources were.

            Since there are real historical characters and events mixed in with the plot of Mr American, it would be nice to know where Fraser’s sources come from.  How much of his detailed description of Edward VII, for example, is based on research, and how much of it is creative license?

* As I said above, there isn’t much plot in this book, but Fraser does a remarkably good job of creating a lot of interest in a small bit of story by setting up little mysteries and points of suspense, and then letting these points simmer for long periods of time as they are only gradually revealed.  Who is this strange American? Why did he come to England?  How did he get his money?  What secrets is he hiding about his past?

            And then a whole other set of questions is created about his relationship with Peggy.  Does Peggy really love him?  Is she being faithful?  What did she really want the money for?

            In my opinion, however, once all the initial mysteries and questions have been resolved, the book lags a little bit.  In the middle section (the whole section with Pip and the art show, and then the trial of Helen Cessford), I found I was losing interest in the plot because most of the mysterious questions had been answered.  I wasn’t sure what the point of the book was anymore, and I had lost my reason to keep turning the pages.

            I think in the middle section Fraser slightly overplays his hand.  In the beginning of the book, the plot unfolds very slowly, but he’s still able to keep interest because the reader knows he’s setting up a story, and the reader want to see where he’s going.

            However once all the chess pieces are on the table, then the same pacing doesn’t work.  It’s a small complaint, but I think the book would have been better if the pacing of the story had gradually speeded up as you went along.

            Also I confess that I just wasn’t that interested in Helen Cessford or her story arch.  (I didn’t care about Helen Cessford because Fraser didn’t give me a reason to care. Fraser apparently has a bit of an axe to grind against the suffragette movement, so Helen Cessford comes across as loud, arrogant, hypocritical, and unlikeable.  Although the appearance of Helen’s great uncle, Flashman, in this section does make up for a lot.)

            The good news is that my interest in the story returned near the end, once the murder investigation began.

            The ending of the book is slightly disappointing because it’s so anti climatic.  And yet, I can’t really complain about it, because the whole style of the book is so subdued that I had suspected all along there would be no big climax at the end.

* More War and Peace connections:

            I half suspect that the connections between War and Peace are not coincidental, and that Fraser may have had War and Peace in his mind as a model when he wrote this book.

            In addition to the similarities mentioned above, both books integrate historical characters and real characters, and provide fictional portraits of the ruling monarchs or their period.  Both books are primarily focused on the lifestyles of the upper-classes, but both books provide portraits of the privileged class at just a time when their way of life was about to be turned upside down by a world war.

            Fraser even explicitly states this theme at times, for example in describing the week just before the outbreak of World War I:

            This week like so many others, that generations would back on with a kind of disbelief and wonder, because it belonged to a world that no one would ever see again, the last ray of a setting sun that had risen in some misty, historic time before anyone could remember and had shone brightly over a gradually changing but still comfortingly consistent scene, and was now about to go down at last. And what everyone would remember was how calm and untroubled it had been, with no possible hint of how the gears of time were about to change for millions of ordinary folk, clashing into a new and frightening revolution as the human race rushed suddenly into a new dark age.  But in that week nobody knew. Nobody could possibly know. (p. 518).

            Also, the marriage between Mark Franklin and Peggy Clayton reminded me a lot of the marriage between Pierre Bezukhov and Princess Helen.  In both cases, a rich man is seduced into marrying a beautiful woman, and only afterwards discovers that their relationship is based on money, and that she doesn’t care for him at all (or in Peggy’s case, only cares for the relationship on her own terms).

            Also, just as Pierre falls in love with Natasha Rostova while trapped in his marriage, so Mark Franklin finds himself intrigued (if not in love) with both Pip and Helen Cessford. 

            I thought Franklin was going to end up escaping from his marriage with Peggy and ending up with one of these other women as Pierre did in War and Peace, but to my surprise Fraser went for a different ending.

            Another difference is that Fraser uses the character of an outsider to allow him an excuse to go into detailed descriptions of Edwardian English society.  Mark Franklin, fresh off the boat from America, needs to learn everything, from how to interact at the local small town pub to how to behave at a royal party.  Tolstoy, of course, gives us a description of early 1800s Russian society entirely from an insider’s view.

* Flashman connections:  

            This book, taking place between 1910 and 1914, shows Flashman at age 88 to 92, what I can only assume is near the end of his life, and is the last chronological appearance of Flashman in Fraser’s fiction.

            However, in terms of publication order, this book is right in the middle of the Flashman canon.  It was published in 1980, and Fraser would go on to write 6 more Flashman books before he died in 2008.

            Some of the later books would go on to better flesh out Flashman’s relationship with Edward VII. 

            In Mr American, we see that Flashman and Edward VII know each other (both speak of the other distastefully) but they hardly seem to have been intimates or have much of a shared history.

            In one of the later books, Flashman and the Redskins, however, Flashman reminisces:
King Teddy's company is something I'd sooner avoid than not, anyway, for he's no better than an upper-class hooligan. Of course, he's been pretty leery of me for forty-odd years (ever since I misguided his youthful footsteps into an actress's bed, in fact, and brought Papa Albert's divine wrath down on his fat head) and when he finally wheezed his way on to the throne I gather he thought of dropping me altogether - said something about my being Falstaff to his Prince Hal.

            In Flashman and the Tiger a whole chapter of the book is devoted to Flashman helping Edward VII (then the Prince of Wales) out of the Baccarat scandal (W).  (Actually being Flashman, he just ends up making the scandal worse, but he was supposed to be helping.)

           In retrospect then, it seems a little strange that none of this was mentioned by either party in Mr American.  (Granted this isn’t a hard example of a continuity error.  You could easily just explain this away by positing that neither Flashman nor Edward VII cared to be reminded of their shared history with each other.  And yet, I’m pretty sure that if Mr American had been written after the other Flashman books instead of before, Fraser would have included some passing reference to this history.)

*The politics of Flashman:

            In this section I rely heavily on inferences, and don’t really know what I’m talking about, so feel free to skip this last part.

            But if you’ve been following my Flashman reviews, you’ll know that I imagine a shift in political opinion between the early Flashman books and the late Flashman books.  The early Flashman books seem to be anti-interventionalist. However the later Flashman books seem to take a pro-interventionalist view of the British Empire—the idea that the world has a lot of problems, and many of these problems are best sorted out by sending in the British Army.

            In terms of publication date Mr American is one of the earlier Flashman books, and it seems more in company with the anti-interventionalist politics of the other early Flashman books, as evidenced in this Flashman speech:

            Mr Franklin….asked the General [Flashman] what he thought of the war situation.  The old man shrugged.

            “Contemptible—but of course it always is.  We should stay out, and to hell with Belgium. After all, it’s stretching things to say we’re committed to ’em, and we’d be doing ’em a favour—and the Frogs, too.”

            “By not protecting them, you mean?  I don’t quite see that.*

            “You wouldn’t—because like most idiots you think of war as being between states—coloured blobs on the map. You think if we can keep Belgium green, or whatever colour it is, instead of Prussian blue, then hurrah for everyone.  But war ain’t between coloured blobs—it’s between people.  You know what people are, I suppose?—chaps in trousers and women in skirts, and kids in small clothes. … imagine yourself a Belgian—in Liege, say.  Along come the Prussians, and invade you. What about it?—a few cars commandeered, a shop or two looted, half a dozen girls knocked up, a provost marshal installed, and the storm’s passed.  Fierce fighting with the Frogs, who squeal like hell because Britain refuses to help, the Germans reach Paris, peace concluded and that’s that.  And there you are, getting on with your garden in Liege. But—” the General waged a bony finger. “Suppose Britain helps—sends forces to aid little Belgium—and the Frogs—against the Teuton horde?  What then?  Belgian resistance is stiffened, the Frogs manage to stop the invaders, a hell of a war is waged all over Belgium and north-east France, and after God knows how much slaughter and destruction the Germans are beat—or not, as the case may be.  How’s Liege doing?  I’ll tell you—it’s a bloody shambles.  You’re lying mangled in your cabbage patch, you’re wife’s had her legs blown off, your daughters have been raped, and your house is a mass or rubble. You’re a lot better off for British intervention, ain’t you?” (p. 530)

            And on the following page Flashman continues:

            “…I could take all the asses who’ll be waving flags and cheering and crowding the recruiting office—take ’em all by one collective arm, and say: ‘Now then, Jack, you know what you’re cheering for? You’re cheering at the prospect of having a soft-nosed bullet fired into your pelvis, shattering the bone and spreading it in splinters all through your intestines, and dying in agony two days later—or, if you’re really unlucky, surviving for a lifetime of pain, unable to walk, a burden to everyone and a dam’ nuisance to the country that will pay you a pension you can’t live off.  That, Jack,’ I’d tell ’em, ‘is what you’re cheering for.’…”

            So it seems to me that this book is much more in line with the earlier anti-interventionalist politics of the earlier Flashman books, and that Fraser’s views might have changed with the subject over time.

            All that being said, I must admit that there is a hole in my theory.  There was at least one pro-interventionalist Flashman book published before this one: Flashman’s Lady, published in 1977--which took a positive view of the British intervention in Borneo (albeit in that case by James Brooks, a private adventurer and not an official government representative, but still….)

            So, how to explain that?  Well, it could be the change was gradual. Flashman’s Lady was at first just an aberration from Fraser’s usual views, but later on these views became more and more the norm.

            Or, it could be that I’ve been looking at this thing all wrong.  I’ve been trying to cram Fraser into my own ideological lens (which is anti-imperialist and non-interventionalist) and only analyzing him by the narrow criteria of whether he is for or against my views.

            But it could be that Fraser takes a more nuanced view of war than I do.  Perhaps he believes in some wars, he just doesn’t believe in stupid wars (like the Afghanistan War, the Crimean War and World War I)

.

            I may not even be fairly characterizing him, but let me offer a quick rebuttal to this point of view anyway:

            When writing historical fiction, Fraser is writing with the full benefit of hindsight.  He’s able to argue against the stupidity of World War I, because in hindsight everyone knows how stupid and pointless that war was.

            At the time, however, it was not so clear.  At the beginning of the war this seemed to people like something that was really important.  There was a real sense of urgency, and people believed the very fate of Western civilization and democracy were at stake, and this swept up even people who should have known better (like the Second Socialist International  (W) and Kropotkin (W).)  There was also so much propaganda and misinformation at the outbreak of the War that supporters of the war were not making fully informed decisions.

            And in fact we’ve seen the same pattern of misinformation at the beginning of the Vietnam War and the most recent Iraq War.

            So if you take the position that war is sometimes justified, sooner or later you’re going to find yourself supporting a stupid war, and then regretting it.

            But like I said, I may not be even fairly characterizing Fraser’s views. 

            If anyone out there knows more about Fraser’s politics, or can put the Flashman series into a consistent ideological framework, let me

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