The reader who looks to fiction for a critique of something or other will find no critique here of anything at all. If there is a glimmer of hope when Mike’s pal Psmith reveals himself a monocle-wearing eccentric and declares himself a socialist, the glimmer will fade once it emerges that his socialism doesn’t extend beyond addressing everyone as “Comrade”, and his eccentricity is not a sign of alienation from the middle-class world he happily inhabits. Psmith and his creator find many things about that world ridiculous — but not contemptible.

The sort of reader I have in mind is most likely Left-wing in their politics, suspicious of anything that mocks a social world not as way of, but as a substitute for, changing it. But the demand for seriousness once came from conservatives worried about the essential frivolity of novels — books that didn’t instruct their readers in manners or morals. It was that view to which Jane Austen was responding in the much-quoted passage of Northanger Abbey where she defends novels as the works “in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed.”

Few writers have seemed to care so little about importance as Wodehouse. His endless linguistic ingenuity made admirers of Left-wing authors such as George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens — the effortless succession of wild similes, the clever deconstruction of weary clichés. That and the mad but intricate plots. But what seems absurd is the idea that anyone might be drawn to Wodehouse for his themes, or what you might call his “ethic”.

In fact, it isn’t absurd at all; it seems so because we only count “serious” themes as real, and conflate having an ethic with being didactic. Yet why shouldn’t a comic view of the world be less insightful than a tragic or an angry one? “If you take life fairly easily”, Wodehouse once remarked to an interviewer, “then you take a humorous view of things. It’s probably because you were born that way”.

His words here recall the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan: “Nature always does contrive / That every boy and every gal / That’s born into the world alive / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative!’ There’s a misplaced debate among Wodehouse’s champions and detractors about exactly where he fits on the political spectrum. Liberal, say readers who see his jokes at the expense of his upper-class characters as satire. Conservative, say readers who notice that he, “in creating such characters as Hildebrand Spencer Poyns de Burgh John Hanneyside Coombe-Crombie, 12th Earl of Dreever… is not really attacking the social hierarchy”.

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Those last words are from George Orwell’s essay, “In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse”. He was writing just after the war, when the uproar about Wodehouse’s idiotic (but well-intentioned) broadcasts on German radio in 1941 were fresh in public memory: Wodehouse was in need of a robust defence. But Orwell, a political man through and through, could not avoid, even when defending Wodehouse’s lack of political nous, adopting a reductive view of the man’s writing. “Wodehouse’s real sin”, he wrote, “has been to present the English upper classes as much nicer people than they are”.

In Orwell’s worldview, whole classes — as distinct from the individuals who comprise them — might have their niceness appraised. Wodehouse, by contrast, sees his characters as individuals — paradoxically so, given how many of them were stereotypes. He once described his approach to his later fiction as “making the thing a sort of musical comedy without music, and ignoring real life altogether”. But the very earliest boarding school novels, animated though they are by a basically comic spirit, are not yet the farces for which he became famous.

Few other stories published in the same magazines that published Wodehouse’s juvenilia stand up today. The clichés are too numerous, the plots entirely interchangeable. But Wodehouse’s early novels hold up surprisingly well. In an age when public schoolboys seem to divided themselves into sentimental nostalgists on the one hand and angry rebels on the other, Wodehouse distinguished himself by the matter-of-fact tone in which he wrote of boys’ attitudes to their schools:

“The average public schoolboy likes his school… He is sorry to leave and he likes going back at the end of the holidays, but as for any passionate, deep-seated love of the place, he would think it rather bad form than otherwise.”

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One can’t doubt that the experience of boarding — involuntary separation from family, the casual brutality of masters and other schoolboys — must have left many boys with scars they carried into adulthood. There is no shortage of memoirs by men who survived the ordeal. But Wodehouse speaks for what must have been the silent majority: men for whom boarding school had its challenges but was not conspicuously more traumatising than any other place they might have spent their childhood and adolescence.

His protagonist, Mike, is a representative of that untraumatised majority. He is a straightforward teenage boy, interested above all in sport. Transplanted midway through the book from a school with fine cricketing traditions, Wrykyn, he finds himself at Sedleigh, a place with an undistinguished sporting tradition. “Mike’s outlook on life,” Wodehouse tell us, “was that of a cricketer, pure and simple. What had Sedleigh ever done? What were they ever likely to do? Whom did they play? What Old Sedleighan had ever done anything in cricket?”

But at Sedleigh, he finds himself set against another character, Adair, to whom “Sedleigh was almost a religion … a public school among public schools, a lump of radium.” (In this we see the beginnings of the grown-up Wodehouse’s talent for the entirely original analogy.) Adair wants Mike to play for the school side; Mike prefers to play for a village team. Like countless schoolboy antagonists, they fight. A little while later, their reconciliation is dramatised in a simple exchange when someone describes Adair as “not a bad cove”, and Mike replies, simply: “He’s all right.”

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There is no mawkish sentiment, but equally, no affectations of adult toughness. The boys have their feelings, but they are the feelings one can imagine real boys having in that time and place. They sort out their problems between themselves and learn to live with other. Each boy has his place in the little world of the school. The book’s most celebrated odd-couple pairing of Mike and a much more flamboyantly eccentric character than Adair: Psmith. He is, of course, “really” a Smith, but informs the bemused Mike when he first meets him: “If you ever have occasion to write to me, would you mind sticking a P at the beginning of my name? P-s-m-i-t-h. See? There are too many Smiths.”

Part of what’s so funny about Psmith is that the silliness of how he spells his name is only apparent in writing. It was Wodehouse’s first really good joke and foretold the many glorious jokes to come — Jeeves and Wooster, Lord Emsworth and his enormous pig. It also encapsulates the wholesomeness that distinguishes him from other comic writers — whose comedy begins in anger and vengefulness. Saki, like Wodehouse, had scary aunts, but took pleasure when they were killed by a vicious ferret. Roald Dahl’s nasty grown-ups are set up for some horrible and ingenious punishment. If political-minded readers are disappointed that Wodehouse doesn’t care more for justice, they might remind themselves that he cared even less for revenge: most of us have a hard time telling the desire for fairness apart from the desire to get even.

We live in a world anxious again to divide people into goodies and baddies, their views into liberal and conservative. Wodehouse was unusual in seeing that it is enough to divide them into “all right” and “bad coves” — in other words, those we like and those we could learn to live with. If that didn’t make him sound like a more solemn figure than in fact he was, you might even call that the deep insight behind his comedy. The message — if that’s not too pompous a thing to ascribe to Wodehouse — is: it takes all sorts to make a world. The right word for the author’s ethic — such as it was — is not “liberalism”, which is the label for a political philosophy; the imputation of any such thing would indeed have made him seriously ill. What he possessed was a rarer, more precious thing: the virtue of liberality.

Wodehouse’s world is one in which the monocled dandy can be friends with the school jock. (A great lover of American English, he would not have protested the Americanism.) And both can live, eventually if not right off the bat, in harmony with the idealist and the prig. Is that an ethical ideal? Not, perhaps, in a sense that Orwell would have recognised. But that only tells us that some people have too narrow a view of the ethical. Whatever those words — ethical, political — mean, they must have something to do with living together with other people. The desire to transform other people so that they live up to our own ideal is at the root of so much political violence. The idea, especially at Christmas, of a writer who doesn’t want to change you — or anyone or anything — is all the more attractive, for just that reason.

As a form however, historical fiction is bristling with risks. Most saliently, anachronisms — to be pointed out by pedantic readers. The exemplar in such matters is Charles Dickens. A draft of his first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge (1841), contained a minor character who was hanged “for passing bad one pound notes”. A correspondent who had seen the proofs wrote to inform him that it was only after 1797 that notes under five pounds were issued; Barnaby Rudge was set in the lead-up to the Gordon Riots of 1780. Dickens checked, assented, and replied to this Victorian pedant, wishing him: “Very many thanks… for your kind care.” (It’s noteworthy not just that he was grateful but that he took care to double-check first.)

Dickens is himself a minor character in Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud, a work of historical fiction set in the 18th and 19th centuries, partly in the bit of northwest London which has inspired most of her non-historical fiction and partly in Jamaica, the narrative spreading over multiple characters and storylines. There is, to start with, the world of the real (but largely — and deservedly — forgotten) novelist William Harrison Ainsworth: his numerous but terrible books, his smug self-satisfaction and his complex domestic arrangements. These are sardonically observed through the eyes of his cousin and housekeeper Eliza Touchet — which Smith takes her to pronounce, with Dickensian aptness, “touché”. But Mrs Touchet’s attention is distracted, like that of countless others in England, with the (also real) cause célèbre of Arthur Orton, a butcher who implausibly claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the long-missing heir to a large inheritance.

But the Tichborne affair, wild from start to finish, provides Smith with her situation rather than her story. Her plotline — or the best of her several — is the one woven around the Tichborne Claimant’s star witness: a Jamaican man named Andrew Bogle who insisted, even when there was little else to support Orton’s claim, that he recognised Sir Roger, a man he had once worked for. Bogle’s own story — of his enslavement and his freedom — ends up being as or more interesting than that of the other people involved in and those breathlessly following the Tichborne Case.

Smith’s handling of Bogle involves a deft synthesis of fact and fiction. And the book comes with a short paragraph acknowledging Smiths’ principal academic sources and thanking one scholar of the period in particular for having read the book in manuscript. Being at best a part-time student of this period, I suspect that I will only embarrass myself if I go about seeking anachronisms. But in any case, this isn’t the sort of book whose interest in history starts and ends with getting the facts right. If that’s all there were to it, why bother fictionalising it at all?

Much mainstream historical fiction does engage in that lower literary pleasure Smith warns of: “cosplay”. And what man doesn’t look better dressed in Mr Darcy’s shirt, or Sir Lancelot’s armour, than in a tracksuit? But historical fiction of this kitschy kind — Philippa Gregory’s Tudor novels are the recent exemplars — also gives us the chance, rare in the modern world, to look at the world through concepts few of us can use today without irony: chastity, honour, vengeance. The popular taste for this sort of fiction, and indeed for the pseudo-medieval worlds in which much fantasy is set, tells us something about our longings for a world before liberal democracy, before “health and safety”, before political correctness.

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But these aren’t Smith’s reasons for succumbing to the lures of history. She evidently intends to write the less kitschy sort of work associated with Hilary Mantel, and before her, Penelope Fitzgerald. Smith is a talented parodist, as anyone would need to be who dabbles in this genre. But a book that contained nothing but parody would be a wearying thing. That is itself a reason why the pedant’s impulse to read with an eye to anachronism misses the point of the best historical fiction. Here, for instance, in a passage describing the Jamaican witness, Bogle, accompanied by a mysterious teenager, appearing before a curious public, is Smith letting us know that she can write “period” when she wants to:

“He [the son], too, was a negro, but of lighter complexion. His extraordinary hair… had been shaped into a pair of triangular wedges, one pointing up, the other down. Surely a son: they had the same narrow, almost Oriental eyes. But where Bogle’s were a shrewd exception in a soft and inconclusive face, the boy’s flashed round the room like lightning.”

The racial terms — “negro”, “Oriental” — are not, of course, Zadie Smith’s, but those of Mrs Touchet, the Victorian character through whose eyes we’re viewing the scene. The same goes for the description of the boy’s “extraordinary” hair, and the inference she — and we — make: “Surely a son.” The clichéd simile at the end, as Smith allows Mrs Touchet herself to observe, is like something from the hackneyed prose of her cousin, William Ainsworth. Lovers of Victorian fiction will recognise Smith as one of them; she has read the same books they have, and doubtless a good many more.

What, then, of Smith’s contention that historical fiction might come at history from an “interrogative angle”? That isn’t true only of historical fiction; it is what any historian worth his salt does anyway. Not even the most vulgar kind of historical narrative can be simply a list of facts about the past. They must be held together by something, usually a question: not just “What happened?” but “How?” and “Why?” And there’s no anachronism in approaching the materials of history — documents, oral testimonies, archaeological remains — with the questions and concerns of the present. Indeed, that approach is what produces the kind of history we can learn something from, an account of the past that has something to tell us. It only produces bad history when it turns out that the past tells us exactly what the present tells us.

Zadie Smith’s own life, lived under the glare of public scrutiny from her bestselling debut, White Teeth, published in when she was in her early 20s, can encourage the view that her concerns are “presentist” in the bad sense. She was for many years, as she has self-deprecatingly described, British fiction’s “multicultural (ageing) wunderkind”. Sceptics put down her success to everything other than the quality and popularity of her books: her mixed racial heritage, her striking appearance, and her flattering the right-on political prejudices of the Anglo-American chattering classes.

These judgments really are unfair, and readers tempted to hold them should try (for evidence of her literary seriousness) her essays on E. M. Forster and George Eliot, (for evidence of her political unclassifiability) her dark and haunting short story about a West African woman effectively the slave of a Muslim family “The Embassy of Cambodia”, and (for evidence of her insight as a critic of contemporary culture) her reviews of such films as The Social Network and Tár. And similarly, the pages of The Fraud are not filled with Left-wing clichés, but ask questions that were always there to be asked about the past.

For instance, one doesn’t need to overstate how many black people there were in Victorian England to be curious about the lives of the small number there indubitably were. A lovely passage in this book has Mrs Touchet take notice of “a band of Ethiopian minstrels” who “had joined forces with a chaunter, singing the broadside he was selling for a penny a sheet” — a simple image of a real London scene that doesn’t need analysis. One can see the trans-Atlantic slave trade as a real evil while acknowledging the complicity of African elites in it and indeed that its abolition, while a real achievement, was only the beginning of a process of emancipation. As Mrs Touchet puts it to a too-complacent dining companion, “No, Mr Chapman, it is not at all an end to the matter. The plantations remain in operation. You might as well say the fire is out while a man still roasts atop the coals.”

It is impossible to avoid the echo of 21st-century activist slogans when we find that there were working-class Londoners, used to being patronised by the legal system, carrying signs that read “BELIEVE BLACK BOGLE”. But Smith allows the reader to entertain the full range of possibilities — that Bogle was the schemer behind the whole affair or that he was in earnest but mistaken. The question of who took Bogle’s testimony seriously is interesting quite apart from the question of whether he was, knowingly or not, lying. The past is, in that sense, exactly like a foreign country. The Mikado has virtually nothing to do with the real Japan because its Japanese setting was never supposed to be anything other than a proxy for England — the real target of Gilbert and Sullivan’s gentle mockery. By the same token, if a novel’s historical setting is supposed to be more than merely incidental, it had better have the capacity to surprise the reader.

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Few people today are going to be much surprised by being told that there were black people in Victorian London, that conditions on British plantations in the Caribbean were often dire, that there was a human zoo at the Great Exhibition of 1851. We are told that often enough now. My favourite scene in The Fraud is the one where Mrs Touchet, in raptures at church over the singing of former slaves (“Had she ever truly heard music until this moment?”) is introduced to one of the singers and finds herself disappointed that the lady is less moved than she is by the occasion. “Why was this young lady so determined to behave as if she had done nothing more remarkable this evening than clean a kitchen or serve a meal?”

A young black man, clearly besotted with the singer, wishes to take the singer on a tour of London, to see “our ‘Big Ben’”. Poor Mrs Touchet cannot handle the ordinariness of people she wants to see as “noble sons and daughters of Africa — filled with the grace of suffering, illuminated by freedom”. She feels shamed by their evident desire to be rid of this earnest do-gooder so they can resume their flirtation. This is often the most surprising thing about history: what it constantly tells us about the banal humanity of human beings.

It is a sign of how far our self-imposed childishness has gone that grown-ups today are unashamed to express passion for books aimed at teenagers — or, to use the ubiquitous but optimistic American expression — “young adults”. Only the very crustiest resist the trend. Would he ever write a children’s book, the late Martin Amis was once asked. “If I had a serious brain injury,” he is supposed to have replied.

It is not only that grown-ups have failed to put aside children’s books, but that their attitude to grown-up things remains childish. Those whose day jobs (like mine) put them in regular contact with older teenagers have been remarking for a while on the increasing demand that fiction be “relatable”. Rebecca Mead defined the attribute in the New Yorker as one possessed by “a character or a situation in which an ordinary person might see himself reflected”. It has increasingly become a stick with which to beat works, often classic works, featuring characters or situations with whom it’s harder to identify. Anna Karenina, for instance, or Hamlet: who among us is a haunted Danish prince or Russian adulteress?

Childishness, Kant said, is “the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance”, and Mead’s case against relatability echoes him. “To demand that a work be ‘relatable’,” she says, expresses the expectation that “the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer … expects the work to be done for her.” If you can’t relate to Hamlet, in other words, you should be open to the possibility that the fault is yours, not Shakespeare’s.

But might there be a way to read children’s books without reading them childishly? The best case for the defence was made by C.S. Lewis in his apologia for reading fairy tales. “They accuse us of arrested development,” he said, “because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things?” I regularly return to the books of my childhood and find exactly what Lewis describes: “Being now able to put more in, of course I get more out.”

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The book of my adolescence to which I have recently returned is one to which I really oughtn’t to be able to “relate” at all, so socially alien are its setting and characters. Its protagonist and narrator is a 17-year-old English girl, an aspiring novelist and already talented diarist called Cassandra Mortmain, living with her impoverished aristocratic family in a crumbling (and rented) castle.

Her novelist father, who achieved some success with his obscure modernist debut (Jacob Wrestling), is blocked. Her stepmother, an artist’s model absurdly named “Topaz”, spends her evenings running naked through the castle grounds. Her elder sister Rose, desperately lonely, says things like: “It may interest you both to know that for some time now, I’ve been considering selling myself. If necessary, I shall go on the streets.” When Cassandra gently points out to her that she is unlikely to come by much trade in the country lanes of Suffolk, Rose asks their stepmother for “the fare to London and … a few hints”. Alas, her stepmother has none to offer.

I Capture the Castle has long inspired more than enough affection in adult readers to tolerate its whimsy; we see in it merits that can survive the reader’s passage into adulthood. It was written by Dodie Smith, best known as the author of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, another novel that can survive an adult reading — especially if you can turn away from the adorable, imperilled puppies to the fabulously camp creation that is their fur-loving nemesis, Cruella de Vil.

The tone of I Capture the Castle is less camp than fanciful. Cassandra and Rose find their bohemian, somewhat cut-off lives, transformed when two American brothers move to a nearby house and turn out to be their landlords. Rose falls in love — or so she claims — with one brother; the other brother dismisses her — or so he claims — as a mere “gold-digger”. Meanwhile, Cassandra struggles to reciprocate the affections of her “swain”, the maid’s son, who is “very fair and noble-looking” even if “his expression is just a fraction daft”. No one is saying what they think, and no one is ever fully admitting how they feel.

Are these anxieties “unrelatable” because they are about posh (if penniless) English people? Or, as I found, almost painfully relatable, because they are about the insecurities of adolescence? And because they come from asking those old questions: will I have the good fortune to find a relationship in which I can both love and be loved back, and a career that allows creative expression but also pays the bills?

Dodie Smith’s whimsy, then, is planted into a world where the stakes are real. Rose’s desperate urge to marry well — that is to say, marry wealth — is entirely familiar from the work of the author who must have been her inspiration. All the characters in I Capture the Castle are intensely aware of what W.H. Auden, in his wonderful lines about the world of Jane Austen, had called “the amorous effects of ‘brass’” — a phrase that could only come from a grown-up reader for whom Lizzie Bennett’s love life is now of less interest than the financial security of her impossible mother and sisters.

Likewise, Smith’s awareness of class. Young Stephen, the maid’s son and general dogsbody, is a more economically productive figure than any of the central characters in the book. But at one painful point he reminisces to Cassandra about when his mother told him “never to play with you unless I was invited. And to call you ‘Miss’, and never to presume. She had a hard job explaining what ‘presume’ meant.” What better image is there of the mechanisms of social class than that of a maid to an impoverished aristocrat explaining to a seven-year-old what it means to “presume”? An adequately empathetic child will understand enough to be sorry for Stephen; it may take a grown-up reader to be indignant on his behalf.

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Rereading the book, I was struck by the extent of Cassandra’s moral seriousness in a story that it is tempting to see as purely comic. Nearly every one of her diary entries seems to contain a mention of her feeling guilty or ashamed about one thing or another. Is this the paralysing self-consciousness of the teenager? Or does it reveal an important axis of gender difference? Is it about a girl being trained to put other people’s needs above her own? About growing up in a society that demands more maturity of girls than of boys?

A memorable passage in Rudyard Kipling’s marvellous novel of schoolboy antics, Stalky & Co., has a schoolmaster observing the boys doing a cruel impersonation of him, and responding simply: “It’s not brutality. It’s boy; only boy.” As the American critic Steven Marcus put it in his classic essay on Kipling, “the word is being used here in a metaphysical sense and as descriptive of a metaphysical state”. I Capture the Castle is one of the few classic books I know where “girl” is treated with an equivalent reverence.

Dodie Smith encourages both her characters and her readers to grow up through an acceptance of girlhood, rather than a rejection of it. If growing up means, as the Bible says, putting away childish things, that must include what C.S. Lewis once pointed out was the most childish of things: “the fear of childishness and the desire to appear very grown up.” Cassandra’s sister Rose repeatedly embarrasses herself because both her fear and her desire are so transparent; she is not grown-up enough to know what it looks like when you’re trying too hard. Cassandra, by contrast, allows herself to be naïve.

My favourite passage of the book is the one where Cassandra gives vent to her resentment at her father’s obscure modernist writing: “Why should Father make things so difficult? Why can’t he say what he means plainly?” Her sister’s beau takes her question entirely seriously, and gives her about as good an answer as that question has ever been given: “Because there’s so much that just can’t be said plainly.” Modernists, he says, are all that stands between us and stagnation. “That’s why one ought not to let oneself resent them — though I believe it’s a normal instinct, probably due to subconscious fear of what we don’t understand.”

It’s this passage that distinguishes I Capture the Castle from the sorts of “YA” fiction that would prefer to keep people in a state of nonage. Smith’s wisdom is really the same as Lewis’s: the point is not to replace childish stupidity with adult sophistication, innocence with experience, naïveté with worldliness. As adults know well, adulthood does not mean replacing the vulnerabilities of childhood for invincibility.

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Writing in the Fifties about the modish and self-consciously sophisticated novels of Jean-Paul Sartre, Iris Murdoch observed that English philosophers, unlike their French counterparts, appeared to live in a world where “people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus; not the world in which they commit sins, fall in love, say prayers or join the Communist Party”. The remark was taken at the time to be a joke at the expense of the English philosophers, but it doesn’t have to be read that way. There is something positively alarming about the idea that the sort of adult seriousness we should be striving for is what Sartre’s novels — emphatically not for children — represent. As if there were anything contemptible about adults doing such things as playing cricket, baking cakes and going to the circus: in a word, about adults playing.

One of Smith’s many contemporary admirers, and an inheritor of her English tradition of clever, self-conscious whimsy, is the scholar and children’s writer Katherine Rundell. In her essay-length book, Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise, she reminds us of just how much grown-ups have in common with the child they once were. Adults too, she writes, need “autonomy, peril, justice, food”. They too need “acknowledgements of fear, love, failure; of the rat that lives within the human heart”.

Of course, not every children’s book can survive its readers growing up. W.H. Auden remarked, in an essay on Lewis Carroll, that “there are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children.” I haven’t met any adults who can get anything out of the Secret Seven, for instance — or, for that matter, any contemporary children, which suggests that they were always just mediocre books. The ones that survive do so because they know how the child lives on in the adult — not as a remnant of something that should have been shed, but as something essential.

At first, the book is promising. Its central conceit is inspired: suppose one were to take up from Thomas Hughes’s worthy Victorian classic of boarding school life, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a relatively minor character — a bully called Flashman — and imagine his life after he was expelled from Rugby. Suppose one were then, ingeniously, to place him in every major colonial (mis)adventure of the Victorian age, starting with the first Afghan War. Suppose one were to keep his original attributes (his cowardice, his intemperance, his spectacular selfishness) but combine them with some useful gifts (for riding, for picking up new languages). Would that not be a neat way to write a historical novel, mixing up the real characters with the invented, and presenting the whole story as the recently-discovered memoirs of a genuine Victorian military hero, reflecting in old age on his ill-spent life — lying, shirking, philandering?

But a couple of chapters in, the racial slurs are flowing like water; the copious sex is entirely consensual only, at a generous estimate, 60% of the time. The tone is that of a romp, the British Empire depicted as a setting in which defrocked public schoolboys might find themselves a little adventure. Reading the author’s words in his own voice does not help. His breezy defences of his hero’s racism, in an essay that appears in most recent editions of the books, are staggering in their complacency: “of course he is [racist]; why should he be different from the rest of humanity?” Aren’t these books seriously… problematic?

There is a case for seeing this hypothetical editor’s views as having a certain integrity. After all, they reflect a hard-won contemporary consensus about the wrongs of both racism and sexism. But they also reflect a trend authors will know well from their recent interactions with editors and agents: the view that to publish a book is to be willing to take responsibility for its contents, as if one had written it oneself. That means, effectively, that an editor’s ambivalence about the morals of a book or its characters are enough to justify not publishing it.

In their insistence on judging the value of a work of art principally in terms of its moral qualities, the publishers of today are heirs to a tradition of puritanism going back to Plato. But there has long been an anti-puritanical argument available too, the most notorious of them being the one articulated by Oscar Wilde: that to assess art in moral terms is to commit some sort of category mistake. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well-written, or badly written. That is all.” But that argument was never very persuasive by itself, and contains a large non sequitur. Why should that be “all”? Why can’t it be that part of what we’re saying in calling a book well-written is that it is morally exemplary? Surely it is those who call on us to leave our moral values at the door who have some explaining to do.

George MacDonald Fraser himself sometimes seemed to take Wilde’s view of the matter. He zealously repudiated, in his non-fiction, all attempts to defend his fiction as covertly anti-colonial, taking great pleasure in mocking critics who “hailed it as a scathing attack on British imperialism”. Was he “taking revenge on the 19 century on behalf of the 20th”? “Waging war on Victorian hypocrisy”? Were the books, as one religious journal was supposed to have claimed, “the work of a sensitive moralist” highly relevant to “the study of ethics”? No, he said, The Flashman Papers were to be taken “at face value, as an adventure story dressed up as the memoirs of an unrepentant old cad”.

Is Fraser’s avowed amoralism the whole story? In one respect, the Flashman books are certainly amoral: they embody no systematic view that colonialism was wrong, illegitimate, unjust. (Nor, come to it, do they embody the view that it was right, legitimate and just.) As Fraser appears to see it in his fiction, empire was simply the default mode of political life in much of the world. This indeed was the case for much of human history. To be colonised was generally a misfortune for the colonised, but the individual coloniser was neither hero nor villain, just a self-interested actor acting on what he believed to be the necessities of his time and place.

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Was Kurt Vonnegut a nice man?

By Dorian Lynskey

We live in a world where we are constantly exercised by the problem of complicity. We wonder: am I complicit in climate change because I just put on the washing machine? In a sufficiently inclusive sense of the word “complicit”, of course I am: one of countless agents whose everyday actions add a tiny bit more carbon to the atmosphere. But outside an ethics seminar, what I’d tell you is that I was just doing my laundry because the clothes were beginning to stink.

Fraser was a deft enough writer to force his characters to confront the larger, what we today might call “structural” questions, in terms that belong to their own times, not to ours. At a pivotal moment in Flash for Freedom, Flashman is enslaved himself in America. Thrown into a cart with a charismatic slave called Cassy, he gets to hear her relish the irony of his position: “Well, now one of you knows what it feels like… Now you know what a filthy race you belong to.” Is there any hope of escape, he asks her desperately. None, she replies, “there isn’t any hope. Where can you run to, in this vile country? This land of freedom! With slave-catchers everywhere, and dogs, and whipping-houses, and laws that say I’m no better than a beast in a sty!” Flashman has the grace to be silent; what can he say?

The characters in the Flashman books, like most citizens of imperial powers in the 19th century, shared in this silence. Empire was the background to their world, much as capitalism is to ours. One needn’t have any kind of high moral view of its aims — spreading civilisation, for instance, or the true religion — to see in it the most reliable source of decent employment, and, if one didn’t die of cholera first, of adventure.

Here lies a major subject of contemporary discussion: how (if at all) we apportion responsibility for something called “structural injustice”, and whether it can be projected back into an age before anyone had recognised that there was such a thing. There are more and less demanding pictures available to us now of what the recognition of complicity demands from an individual. But any sane view of the matter has to allow for moral distinctions between the actions of different people within an unjust system. Not every bureaucrat in Thirties Germany was the moral equivalent of a concentration camp guard.

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University needs to hurt

By Arif Ahmed

Fraser was notoriously averse to acknowledging any such complexity in his non-fictional pronouncements. He said of his experience of the end of empire in India simply that it was “the end of an old and glorious song, and I was lucky to be part of it”. His imagination had, after all, been stocked with the “stout-hearted stories for boys which my father won as school prizes in the 1890s”. Reading the works of Walter Scott, among others, taught him that the history of empire was like all history, in being “one tremendous adventure story”. His own military experience in Burma gave him a real feel for the landscapes in which that history had taken place — India, China, Malaya, Australia, Benin, Madagascar — and his subsequent experience as a journalist gave him a “lust for finding the truth behind the received opinion”. That truthfulness he gave to his anti-hero, making one of Flashman’s few virtues his “shameless honesty as a memorialist”.

Aris Roussinos, writing in these pages earlier this year, suggested plausibly that “the Flashman novels became a means for Fraser to process his own experiences of war, and loss and change, and to express his political and moral feelings with a complexity and ambiguity he was incapable of achieving in his memoirs”. The reason the Flashman stories could have been read as exposés of Victorian hypocrisy is not hard to find: their narrator frequently complains about it. The callous stupidity of leaders, both military and civilian, is Flashman’s great bugbear. He is in an especially good position to see both their callousness and their stupidity for what they were, because he does not have the high ideals — of the white man’s proverbial burden, for instance — that would encourage him to put a nobler complexion on them. He is a cad, but so in his view are the much-fêted men he is required to obey (Disraeli, Palmerston, Raglan of the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade); maybe it takes one to know one.

It is the avowed commitment to this sort of truthfulness that complicates the story Fraser wanted to tell about himself. The journal he mocked for treating his novels as the work of a serious moralist had in fact got it right, as long as we distinguish (to borrow a pair of terms from the American philosopher Stanley Cavell) between a “moralist” and a “moraliser”, between someone talking at us and someone talking to us. Like other unreliable narrators, Flashman’s words — to echo John Lanchester on the amoral, over-sexed (but gay) hero of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library — are “darkened by the pressure of another possible reading, a reading which has a deeper vision of life than the narrator’s”. In Flashman in the Great Game, set during what colonial sources used to call the Indian ‘mutiny’ of 1857, Flashman briefly sets down the final moments in the life of a British riding-master, who has just been struck down by Indian cavalrymen he once trained himself. The old man is neither indignant nor self-pitying. Flashman informs us that he

coughed blood, and his voice trailed away into a whisper. “They shaped well, though…didn’t they…shape well? My Bengalis…” He closed his eyes. “I thought they shaped…uncommon well…”

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Philip Larkin was a filthy genius

By Nicholas Harris

The so-called mutineers are heroes, skilled fighters in a cause they see as just; but so too are the men they had, until recently, obeyed without question, decent men who did their jobs honourably, failing only — like most people — to think hard enough about the system that made it all possible. It is possible to be wholly on the side of the “Bengali” rebels and still find these dying words both intelligible and moving. It would be a cruel principle of literary criticism, and a silly one, that insisted that our anti-colonial sympathies had not merely to supersede all our other sentiments but to dictate them. But some styles of modern criticism seeking out only what is “problematic” in old fiction appears committed to just such a principle.

There is more in the Flashman stories than even their author was willing, or able, to admit. One might say that they “tell the truth about empire”, but that is an unintelligent phrase if it means that there is one truth to tell about empire. Like other large historical phenomena — the spread or decline of Christianity, the Industrial Revolution, modernity — there are countless truths to tell about it. All we can try to do is to be truthful: to get the facts right, and to be honest about our reactions to them. The Flashman stories remind us, at a time when we seem to need these reminders, that a morally serious history need be neither simple nor humourless.