HarperCollins £17.99 pp317

The first shot fired in volume 12 of the Flashman papers is an authorial broadside at the Blair government’s duplicity and “messianic rhetoric” concerning the war in Iraq. It is an unusual political intrusion by George MacDonald Fraser, although perhaps understandable in the light of the dramatic ideological convulsions that have taken place in the 11 years since his cowardly Victorian cad made his last full-length outing in print, in 1994’s Flashman and the Angel of the Lord.

Whether we are meant to divine any links between the barbaric Abyssinian ruler that British forces are sent to rout in this new book and another bloody despot currently awaiting trial in Baghdad is uncertain. What is clear from the off is that Flashman remains “a model of the best vices — lechery, treachery, poltroonery, deceit, and dereliction of duty, all present and correct”. Thank heaven for that.

We join him in 1868, a sword’s-breadth ahead of an Austrian officer whose great-niece he has ravished and — his mile-wide yellow streak notwithstanding — happy to be advancing with Sir Robert Napier’s forces to free a party of Her Majesty’s subjects held captive by the deranged, Kurtz-like Abyssinian king, Theodore.

Not one to rebuff the amorous advances of the nubile Nubians who fling themselves at his breeches, Flashy is much less enamoured of an undercover mission that sees him strapped into an iron-maiden-like contraption and dangled above an abyss, being dragged into the maw of a raging waterfall (his chivalry disappears over the edge, along with his vengeful warrior lover Uliba-Wark) and — in an arch inversion of his own fiendish party trick from Tom Brown’s Schooldays — nearly roasted by natives on a fire.

MacDonald Fraser’s rollicking, roistering novel is not so much a march as a full-blooded charge, fortified by the usual lashings of salty sex, meticulously choreographed battle scenes and hilariously spineless acts of self-preservation by the eponymous bounder. As you are whisked at an unflagging clip from one comical coupling (“I confess I entered into the spirit of the thing uninvited, going ‘Brrr!’ between her boobies as she collapsed whimpering on my ruined carcase”) to the next life-threatening scrape, it feels like being in the company of an old friend — albeit one who is likely to roger your wife, seduce your daughter, snaffle your finest cigars and polish off your best brandy.

In a recent newspaper interview, the author expressed his concern that politically correct young critics might try to do to his creation what the Indians at Little Big Horn, the Russians at Balaclava and, most recently, the “Ladies’ De-ballacking Circle” of bloodthirsty Abyssinian Amazons have so far failed to do. Heaven knows, the pendulum has swung a long way in the past decade and the PC brigade will undoubtedly find enough ammunition in this latest chronicle to have the unreconstructed hero court-martialled twice over (“I bar vicious bitches who are prepared to burn me to death by inches, but she’d been a peach and I’d have dearly liked to explain the Kama Sutra to her by demonstration”), but such po-faced carping hardly seems any less craven than Flashman himself. In an age where so much fiction is mere smoke and mirrors, we might well ask ourselves what is so wrong with being wholly entertained by the waft of gunsmoke and a singular character’s shameless vanity? As Abraham Lincoln, a former acquaintance of Flashy, was wont to say: “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”

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