Word: flashman
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...FLASHMAN AT THE CHARGE by GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER 286 pages. Knopf...
Like the three previous "packets" of fictional Flashman memoirs (Author Fraser pretends to be nothing more than
Spirit. This is revisionist history carried to the most amiable extreme. It bears a distant relationship to George MacDonald Eraser's superb Flashman memoirs. But while Eraser has produced some remarkable light entertainment, Sobel has manufactured an obsessive parlor game. He is a master pedant who, without cracking a smile, plods through heavily footnoted mock details of North America's internal and external struggles from 1775 to the present. Indeed, there is so much beady-eyed detail that a reader can argue as well about the C.N.A.'s 1966 election (Carter Monaghan, of the People...
...conflict with Flashman stems from an altercation between Flashman, Sr. and young Tom before Tom ever set foot on Rugby soil, Flashman, Jr. is an evil, scheming individual, but he is his father's running dog, following orders and not just a rotten school bully. And much of the skirmishing between Flashman and Tom takes place outside of Rugby, involving outside allies that Flashman drags in to bedevil Tom. Rugby school plays a much smaller role in the TV serial than it did in Thomas Hughes's nineteenth century novel. The school is only an arena...
Richard Morant, as Gerald Flashman, is an ideal smirking cruel dandy, and Iain Cuthbertson, as the headmaster Doctor Arnold, presents an acceptable outward resemblance to the pious Victorian reformer. But in attempting to portray Arnold at all on television, problems arise that Hughes never faced in his novel. On a TV screen there is no way to show the headmaster as he appeared to a 12-year-old boy. So taking refuge in a stereotype is pardonable, even if the stereotype is something of a distortion...