This must perforce be the last Flashman book by George MacDonald Fraser, as the author died in 2009. (I wonder if there’s been any talk of another writer taking up the mantle. I wonder if another writer could do it properly. We’ve all been waiting a long time for Flashman’s Civil War adventures, which in terms of pure chronology would almost immediately precede this story.)

When we join Sir Harry Paget Flashman at the beginning of Flashman On the March, he’s desperately attempting to get out of Trieste, where he recently arrived as a refugee following a stint as an officer of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico (poor Maximilian!). He runs into an old acquaintance, a British diplomat who is trying to find someone to protect a shipment of silver to Suez, for delivery to Gen. Robert Napier. Napier is buying support from various African tribes against King Theodore of Abyssinia (today known as Ethiopia). Theodore, who Flashman will come to describe as the maddest monarch he ever met—which is saying a great deal–has kidnapped a number of Europeans, and Napier is leading a relief force.

Flashman’s best-laid plan is to deliver the silver, collect whatever reward he can get, and rush home to his wife in England. Needless to say, it doesn’t work out that way. Flashy’s undeserved reputation for heroism causes Napier to offer him an espionage job, going in ahead of the troops, and Flashy can’t get out of it without admitting his true cowardly nature to the whole world. So he soon finds himself heading inland, disguised as an Indian Muslim, with a comely native queen/amazon for a guide.

If you’re a Flashman fan, you have a pretty good idea what comes after that. Flashman will have carnal knowledge of his guide, and he will be captured and threatened with torture and death, and he will do appalling things to save his own life at the expense of others, and he will survive each crisis, perhaps a little damaged but alive, and in the end everyone will think him a hero (“judging me by himself,” as Flashman says of Napier). And almost unnoticeably, a considerable amount of historical information, and some reasonable perspective on the British Empire, will be dispensed to the reader.

I’m reluctant to wholeheartedly recommend this or any Flashman novel on a Christian book site. There is unquestionably a lot of sex going on here, with a fair degree of explicitness. Flashman swears in a Soldier of the Queen sort of way, and he’s certainly no role model.

But the author, Fraser, was a conservative and a traditionalist. I think those who see the Flashman books as subversive works are misreading them (I could, of course, be wrong). Flashman is a living lesson that a coward dies a thousand deaths. The greatest fun of the books, for me, is seeing this appalling poltroon scared out of his wits again and again. Very frequently the circumstances that save his life scare him as much as the original peril. And from time to time, he is grudgingly forced to admit his admiration for better men, like Gen. Napier or the hostage Dr. Blanc:

Well, he didn’t funk nor hesitate, and since it’s thanks to him that I’m here to write this memoir, well, here’s to Henry Blanc, M.D., staff assistant surgeon to H.M. Bombay Army. Salue!

I was a little surprised at the end that an expected plot element never materialized, but that just means Fraser could mix it up a little, even at the end. R.I.P. G.M.F., and thanks for all the bully yarns!