Return of Little Big Man (Hardcover)

Although historical romance can be a good guide to real history (and George MacDonald Fraser, whose Flashman series bears more than a passing resemblance to Lttle Big Man, has pointed this out in Fraser's Hollywood History of the World), it is in a sense impossible to extricate the historical romance from its own time.

The original book and the movie appeared at a time, the 1960s, in which the American story of the frontier was undergoing a rapid change as a consequence of the Vietnam war. In a sense, our adventure in Vietnam was a continuation of our Western adventures which attempted to transfer Manifest Destiny across a rather large ocean...and which failed.

There are echoes of these concerns in the book and the movie Little Big Man (which came out about 1969) made a conscious comparision of our Western policies with our Vietnam policies.

Thirty years on and partly as a consequence of the many social changes that occured in the 1960s, a sort of Victorianism has returned to the USA: for one thing, sheer hypocrisy is no longer laughed out of court...as evidenced by the Starr investigation of Clinton.

As a result, Berger's latter-day Jack Crabbe, the "sole white survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn", is a different persona than the picaresque individual of the first book [parenthetically, and judging from Berger's first novel, George MacDonald Fraser's "Flashman and the Redskins" and many other works, Greasy Grass was quite crowded with white survivors. Apparently there were dozens of unaccounted scouts, 'breeds, British officers, mad bishops and perhaps a German band present at the battle :-).]

A "picaresque" novel, which the original novel was and the sequel isn't, is at least supposed to be the comic adventures of a character of lower morals than ours. Fraser carries this off quite nicely in Flashman, and has an attractive breeziness with regards to his character (the bully of the 19th century book by Thomas Arnold who in Fraser goes on to be present at most military disasters of the 19th century British empire.)

Fraser does not judge Flash Harry and Flash Harry, speaking through Fraser, does not try to be better than he is. Flashy honestly loves, lusts, and sees the dawn "come up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay."

But the latter-day Jack Crabbe seems to strain away from the Wild West towards something finer and to at one and the same time want a more gilded and virtuous existence...yet betray himself at the critical point.

The original Jack Crabbe "knowed Custer for what he wuz" and knew hisself for what he wuz. The latter day Jack Crabbe is much more ambivalent about his existence on the frontier and somewhat contemptuous of men like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. He judges them harshly, when he himself gets drunk in New York when he thinks his inamarota (Amanda Teasdale, a defender of the Indians and a precursor of the Politically Correct) has gotten married.

I cannot tell Mr Berger, who has written an excellent and entertaining book, how to build a character. But I do notice that whereas the first Jack Crabbe reserved his judgement for societies that exterminated the native peoples of this continent, the latter day Crabbe tends more to judge people. This is less an artistic flaw than an indication of how America has changed from 1964 to 1999. It does deprive us of the pleasure and scandal of the picaresque, and, in Victorian terms, The Return of Little Big Man is less titillating and more of an Improving Moral Tale.

I am old enough to have lived in certain dying embers of the Victorian age: my grandparent's parlor was in that style. This is probably why I am titillated by the picaresque in the first place. To relate to Flash Harry, one has to have, like Clinton and I, scuttled for cover during the Vietnam war. Berger's first novel constructed, in the figure of the Hehmaneh, an alternative to the modal midcentury American male. Nowadays, absent the military draft, this is probably not as attractive to younger readers...and it seems that Berger is at pains to tell us in this book that the Hehmaneh were uncommon, and to have Jack Crabbe be positively contemptuous of "queeries" (Crabbe's hilarious mispronunciation of the Prince of Wales' "equerries") who Jack thinks are tutti-fruity. Here there is a shift back to intolerance.

It is my view that a novelist, if the novelist is constructing a non-picaresque role model character, should not in any way have that character, at the end of the day, have unattractive personal traits...but Crabbe's limitations are just these. Shakespeare's Hamlet says, use every man according to his deserts, and none of us should 'scape whipping...not Flash Harry, nor Wyatt Earp. In the great desert of American fiction, in which unattractive-but-cool characters are more or less force fed to the reader (as in the unspeakable Tom Wolfe) one does look in vain for Flashman, or Hamlet, or even Captain Ahab.

Without rehashing the plot that other reviewers have already gone over, I would describe RoLBM as "more of less". More of the Old West stories without the compelling drama. Famous names wander into view from stage left and exit stage right without giving the reader any sense of awe. "Oh look, here comes Sitting Bull. There he goes. How nice."

It is my personal opinion that the main reason an author waits 35 years to publish a sequel to his most famous work is due less to need for creative outlet and more the desire for financial gain. That the author broadly hints at yet a third book tends to back my theory up. Not that authors aren't entitled to make money but art should fall in there somewhere.