Captain in Calico by George MacDonald Fraser - review

Fraser’s far lesser Flashman. By Melanie McDonagh
Excellently written: George MacDonald's Captain in Calico
AFP/Getty Images
Melanie McDonagh10 September 2015

Go Set a Watchman wasn’t the only lost masterpiece published this summer. For fans of George MacDonald Fraser, creator of Flashman, the recovery of this lost early work from the Fifties promised a treat of the same order.

His children admit in the foreword that they thought hard about the wisdom of publishing it: “We do not want readers to be deceived into thinking it is vintage George MacDonald Fraser,” though they think it is “excellently written”.

They were right to be diffident. Rather sportingly they have included the publishers’ rejection letters, which are in a different class to what you’d get now and which identify what’s wrong with it: too long and overwritten.

It’s a pirate story for which the adjective “swashbuckling” could have been coined, complete with a female swashbuckler, Anne Bonney, who combines a voracious sexual appetite and red hair with a nice hand at fencing. Remarkably for a novel that includes a couple of duels and a last-minute reprieve for our hero, Jack Rackham, from being hung, drawn and quartered, it’s actually hard going. It’s like fans of Jeeves going to the early school stories of P G Wodehouse and finding them to be nothing like the later stuff. The children’s judgment that the novel is a “delightful curiosity” is spot on.

But there’s cheer for fans in the re-publication of all of the original Flashmans in a new edition. Let’s hope it will bring another generation of readers to the anti-hero and his peerless take on the bits of British history that you’d never know about otherwise.

He is one of the immortals.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £13.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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