I had heard about the Flashman novels – a sort of send-up of nineteenth and early twentieth century adventure novels. I’d seen the books in my local used bookstore and had been intending for some time to buy one and send it my father (who, like his older brother, has something of thing for Victoriana adventures; Kipling sort of stuff). But, naturally, I had to read it for myself first.

Flashman is more straightforward than I would have thought and the hero not so bad as I’d been lead to believe and less over the top. I wasn’t totally thrilled by his voice and it found it less than unique, but a rather straightforward pulp-style voice, only with a less admirable character.

There were some fun moments, mostly around Henry Flashman’s sexual failures. Firstly, when he tries to seduce a fellow officer’s wife, but she fights him off, not realizing that having one’s breasts fondled by a man isn’t a sign of ordinary affection, like shaking hands, but a sexual signal. Her shock and horror that he would have misinterpreted her accepting giggle of his boob fondling to be an implication that she wants a roll in the hay was lovely. Also, it was nice to see Flashman have to come to grips with (and accept) his wife’s apparent infidelity whilst he was in India and Afghanistan.

Also, I suspect that his account of the utter disaster of the British retreat from Kabul in 1842 (and also the events leading up to it) is not that bad.

By the way, Henry Flashman was a character in Tom Brown’s School Days and this Flashman is intended to be him – in fact, it begins with the expulsion of Flashman, related in that book.

Alien Hearts is not a very nice book. The two leads are a vain and uninteresting woman who makes herself moderately famous in society by collecting artists and intellectuals by means of making them fall in forever unrequited loved with her and an even more uninteresting man who is rich and at edge of still being a young man and precipice of middle age and who has no real talent, unless you consider insecurity a talent. Oh, and the woman abandons her artists when she receives and opportunity to join higher, more aristocratic society in fin-de-siecle Paris.

The whole assemblage is appropriately alienating. It similar to, but so much more unsettling (and less enjoyable) than The Red Lily. Unlike that book, there are real casualties in this one.

The ‘hero’ seduces a young waitress and takes her as his servant and later promises to ‘keep’ her in a house in Paris with a maid as his mistress. All the while, he is just waiting/preparing to re-enter the ‘heroine’s’ society and possibly her bed. It’s really, really unsettling to read.

I think of The Great Gatsby:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

I keep on coming back to the word ‘alienating.’ Everything about the book is profoundly and deliberately alienating.

At least I learned a new word: Ewig-weibliche

Apparently, it means something like the eternal feminine. Goethe made it famous, I guess.