Yankee-Panky

By Michael Demarest

MR. AMERICAN

by George MacDonald Fraser Simon & Schuster; 557 pages; $16.95

This side of Browning's April, the Edwardian era was the best of times to be in England, especially if one was well heeled and of sportive bent. The nation basked in the golden autumn of Pax Britannica, with almost nothing to grouse about but the grouse (not enough of them). For Americans who could afford the fare, the country was the social and cultural equivalent of a well-stuffed hamper from Fortnum & Mason. So is Mr. American, a splendidly entertaining English adventure novel of the old school.

Mark J. Franklin, the protagonist of George MacDonald Eraser's new book, mines deep rewards on his arrival in London in 1909. A wealthy, enigmatic figure of taciturnity and gangling good looks, the Westerner has come to England to explore the roots his forebears pulled up in 1642. He settles in as squire of the ancestral village, Castle Lancing, is accepted at the local pub, marries into the aristocracy, and even becomes a passing pal of the rotund monarch his intimates refer to as "Kingie." Mr. Franklin, as the author calls him, ostensibly dug his huge fortune from a silver mine at Tonopah, Nev. Gradually, though, it emerges that this sober, self-educated man had earlier been a desperado, a gunman allied with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Inexorably, his scapegrace past catches up with the nouveau aristocrat of Norfolk. Fortunately, he has thought to pack his two .44 Remingtons.

Throughout, life in town and country is laced with sundry subplots involving rogues, bullies, detectives, tarts and popinjays, as well as a few sterling characters ranging from a Cantabrigian historian to a gentleman's gentleman, who almost rates a novel by himself. Young Churchill makes an appearance. The suffragists and the Irish troubles and Kaiser Wilhelm crowd in, sometimes hilariously. Edward VII comes across --accurately--as a spoiled, imperious near Nero who nonetheless had a regal way with bridge, economics and foreign policy. The novel ends in 1914, four years after Edward's death, as the honeyed England of Rupert Brooke's young dreams slides toward the nightmare of Wilfred Owen's trenches.

Author Fraser, 56, an excellent popular historian (The Steel Bonnets) as well as a prolific screenwriter (The Three--and Four--Musketeers), is best known for his seven Flashman novels, the saga of a Falstaffian poltroon who for sheer cad-dishness has no equal in contemporary literature. Like the Flashman mock memoirs, which skewer the Victorian scene with such wealth of detail that many American reviewers at first thought them to be authentic historical documents, Mr. American teems with minutiae ranging from the price of the London & Northwestern train trip from Liverpool to London (just under $6, first class) to details of the Countess of Cardigan's Recollections (scandalous).

This could all be trivial and tedious, but in Eraser's grasp it is convincing. Not the least of the book's charms is the return, at 87 and only slightly mellowed, of the redoubtable Flashy: that is, Brigadier General Sir Harry Paget Flashman, V.C., K.C.B., K.C.I.E., Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, winner of the U.S. Medal of Honor, and the San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth (Third Class). The last is one award the old bounder has never explained. One can only hope that Flashy will fill in that gap in Mr. American II.

--By Michael Demarest

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