Carved out a bit of time over the weekend to make gloriously slow progress on my on-going Flashman novel. And what's so glorious about reading Fraser's work slowly? The fact you get the chance to relish every nuance of his brilliant stylistic confections, that's what.
I don't think I quite grasped this on my first reading of the series as it was being published. At that time I was keen to enjoy the sheer verve of the narrative and really needed to know what was going to happen next. Now I sort of know, though I've managed to forget the intricacies of plotting, of which there are many, as I usually do. Back then I found some of the dialogue a touch hard-going, especially when Fraser is 'doing' a voice. Interestingly a lot of modern-day readers find the likes of Kipling and Hardy (when he's doing his Wessex yokels) tiresome in this regard. But this is to miss the essential democratisation of the language that is going on. Rendering the accent is as much an act of homage as it is an act of demarcation from the 'standard'. And in Fraser's case huge fun is to had from his sheer enjoyment of what his characters do to the language in their enhanced mangling of it.
My favourite so far: Nawleans, in itself a kind of poetic tribute to that great city.
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