Gross Under Pressure

FLASH FOR FREEDOM! by GEORGE MacDONALD FRASER 287 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

In this, the third installment of his maculate memoirs, Harry Flashman comes to the United States (circa 1848). As usual it is all a terrible mistake. "Whenever I'm feeling up to the mark and congratulating myself," the great bounder glumly remarks, "some fearful fate trips me headlong, and I find myself haring for cover with my guts churning and Nemesis in full cry after me."

In this case, fate's banana peel is a game of vingt et un with (among others) Benjamin Disraeli. Flashy is precipitated through a few more dead waters of Victorian history and into a series of unspeakable yet plausible adventures. Among them are a slaving voyage, a sea battle off New Orleans, a meeting with Abe Lincoln (who spots him for a fraud, but not before Flashman tosses off a nice line about fooling some of the people all of the time), and a brief term of actual enslavement. "By the time you laboured in the sun a spell, you brown up pretty good, I reckon," says the plantation owner. Thereafter Flashy manages a cold-sweat crossing of the Ohio River on--what else?--ice floes, and demonstrates (again and again) his unusual if limited talents ("I doubt if there's a man living who can move faster with his pants around his ankles than I can").

Some credit must go to "Editor" Fraser, whose excellent legitimate history of the Scottish borders, The Steel Bonnets (Knopf), has just been published. Equipped with nothing more than a few basic history texts and a taste for turpitude, Fraser now appears to be parlaying the fictional recollections of his imaginary character into something closely resembling a perpetual motion novel. Of course it helps to have a rotter like Harry Flashman up front. "Bluff, my boy--bluff, shift and lie for the sake of your neck and the honor of Old England." "Charles Elliott

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.