Few things suck more for the traveler than nasty surprises. Yet we keep traveling. Not simply because we like to travel or, in many cases, we must travel, but because as rational beings we accept that the world is an imperfect place and that we shouldn’t expect too much in the way of personal attention from the colossus of modern travel.

In offering the travel industry at large, the following suggestions for improving its product—some revolutionary, some disarmingly simple—I’m not asking for the stars. I seek neither the impractical (first-class leather seats in coach), the implausible (teleportation), nor the unrealistic (airport concourses that demand less walking than a breast cancer fund-raiser). Instead, I’ll simply hand over ideas that, implemented with minimum effort, are conceived to save the industry money as $4-a-gallon approaches, while making the travel experience more pleasant for all. And by “all” I mostly mean “me.” Since none of these brainstorms are protected by patents, licenses, or other legal restrictions, Big Travel can feel free to begin making my life better right away. I’ll start with a few easy ones and work up to the big-ticket items.

1. Fall out of love with your own voice
“On the left side of the aircraft, folks can get a nice view of the Salton Sea.” “The captain has turned on the fasten seat belt sign.” “We’ll be coming through the cabin shortly with a choice of beverages.” “In just a few moments we’ll be starting our descent into the Newark area.” “We know you have a choice in air travel and we thank you for choosing us.”

On a two-hour, fifteen-minute flight from Dallas to Chicago I once kept a running tally of every piece of patter that came over the intercom. No more than nine consecutive minutes ever passed without a superfluous announcement of some type. Almost all of these concerned matters passengers would have figured out anyway, such as, “In just a few minutes we’ll begin our video programming” (more on this shortly) and “You can stow your larger items in the overhead bins.” I get that any job on an airplane is tedious and repetitive, but take away his entire collection of Spiderman videos and Ben 10 figurines and my seven-year-old nephew still demands less attention than pilots and flight attendants. Intercom use should be reserved for three circumstances: departure safety briefing, landing announcement, and emergencies.

2. Don’t make us ask
Nothing spoils a meal like being held hostage to an uppity or lackadaisical waiter’s notion of when you’ll be allowed to leave the restaurant. Checks should be delivered with the final course, at least for businesses lunches.

3. Abolish institutionalized taxi rape
One the enduring mysteries of travel is the overwhelming percentage of municipalities that allow the first impression of their cities to be an extortionate $45 cab ride from the airport to downtown. Does the Mafia run every taxi company in the world? Is it too much to ask that visitors to major cities be spared from getting fleeced as if they’ve concluded a transaction with a twenty-dollar streetwalker as soon as they get to town? Affordable rides into the city would eliminate a significant amount of the stress and hassle endured by visitors coming to a place for the first time. If private enterprise can’t responsibly accommodate tourists, local legislation should be employed to force them into it.

4. Retire the beverage cart
Responsible for more mashed toes, shin splints, and dislocated elbows than the WWE, these two-hundred-pound chariots of doom present passengers in aisle seats with a constant danger, cost airlines money, and keep me from taking a piss at precisely the moment I most need to. To shave expenses, airlines have already done away with most food. The next logical step is ending the tiresome drink service that creates more trouble than it’s worth. For flights of three hours or less, hand out bottles of water and sell beer, wine, and booze in the departure lounge. This will save the airlines money and labor and, for customers, eliminate the risk of being sideswiped every five minutes by the polyestered haunch of an exhausted stew horsing a Sisyphun weight up and down the aisle taking drink requests and barking orders—“Keep your feet and knees in!”—with all the élan of the guy who sits in the booth and weighs me in at the dump.

5. Or at least eliminate the paper trail
Why do I need a tissue-thin napkin every time someone on an airplane hands me four ounces of water in a urine-sample cup? Former American Airlines chairman Robert Crandall once famously saved his company $40,000 a year by eliminating the olive from salads the airline once served onboard. A small redwood forest could be recycled from the napkins airlines plow through each year.

6. Update hotel check-in times
In 1946, the Tote’m convenience-store chain extended its hours from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., announcing its groundbreaking move by changing its name to 7-Eleven. In 1974, the company now known as ACCEL/Exchange booted up the world’s first twenty-four-hour ATM network. In 2005, England and Wales ushered in the era of never-ending public drunkenness by granting licenses allowing pubs to serve liquor round-the-clock.

Yet as nonstop commerce has created a sleepless planet, hotels remain mired in conventions of the 1800s, when the stagecoach or steam train rolled in and out of town once each afternoon and again the following morning. With airlines cleaving away from the hub-and-spoke system (which once rigidly controlled arrival and departure times) in favor of more or less continuous schedules and red-eye flights, the hotel industry needs to restructure its own arrival and departure policies to reflect modern traffic flow. Few miseries compare to landing in a city at 6 a.m. only to while away the morning in traveler’s purgatory awaiting an “early” one o’ clock check-in that you had to grovel to get. The major hotel chain that figures out a way to implement anytime check-in will become the new Hilton. Unless, of course, Hilton gets to it first.

7. Address us like adults
One of the best things about leaving the United States is being spoken to like an adult. Once overseas, the quick temper, simpleton instructions, nursery-school tenor, and scripted happy talk that exemplify the American travel industry’s idea of “service”—the chirpy banter from flight attendants on Southwest Airlines being the pinnacle of infantilism—are replaced by straightforward, competent voices delivering information in a crisp, capable manner. I love England because it’s like a grown-up America, a fact I’m reminded of as soon as I get on a British Airways flight or hop into a London cab. We’ve come to expect politicians and media to speak to us like we’re children—people who fly our airplanes, drive our busses, steer our ships, and run our hotels shouldn’t talk to us as though we just learned to finger paint.

8. Stop the parade
For safety and security purposes, the FAA requires flight attendants to perform a visual check of an aircraft cabin every fifteen minutes. Airlines make use of these mandated rounds by coupling them with a spate of busy work that’s become the bane of passengers who just want to read, work, watch videos, or sleep without interruptions from flight attendants who march up and down the aisles like North Korean border guards. Passengers can’t “sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight” (While we’re at it, how about killing off that overused nugget of twaddle?) if the entire cabin crew is acting like Mom at Thanksgiving, running around so much that the rest of us can’t just relax without someone haranguing us every twenty seconds with more food, drink, or whatever. All we want is to be left alone.

9. Blow us (or at least our wives and girlfriends)
The hotel industry could instantly delight half the population by making blow dryers mandatory in every hotel room in the world. In addition to creating much-coveted luggage space, this simple addition would all but do away with the “God, my hair looks like shit in this picture” regret that vexes females for decades after otherwise pleasant vacations.

10. Decommission wide-bodies
If airlines are going to insist on aisles that are fewer than seventeen inches wide, they should also insist on employees who are fewer than seventeen inches wide.

11. No more enforced TV viewing
As anyone stranded for more than ten minutes in a departure lounge knows, the CNN Airport Network and its eight-minute programming loop is the most excruciating torment devised since CNN International, the channel dubiously famed for its passionate coverage of Lithuanian soccer league injury reports and Formula One qualifying heats from Macau. It may be too much to ask airports to stop assaulting innocent bystanders with piped in CNN weather updates from Guillermo Arduino. But once onboard, when I turn off the tiny monitor embedded in the seat nine inches from my face, it’d be nice if the damn thing stayed off instead of constantly reawakening itself to taunt me into becoming acquainted with the thrilling shopping opportunities in my arrival city, watching bad movies edited to protect the sensibilities of ten-year-old Mormon boys, or staring numbly at the monotonous progress of a little icon representing my boredom traveling across the Great Plains or Atlantic Ocean.

12. Open the damn door
Some propositions that seem fifty-fifty really aren’t. Like dropping a piece of buttered toast. We all know the minute it goes down that it’s not coming off the floor without a collection of lint, dirt, and hairs stuck to the golden half. Same principle applies to double doors, one side of which hotels, restaurants, and other businesses are obsessed with keeping locked, so that patrons inevitably clank up against the locked side. Unless you’re managing a prison, there’s no reason to infuriate the luggage-hauling masses unfamiliar with the particulars of local door management.

13. Let babies be babies
With a few exceptions, this list of suggestions doesn’t seem all that onerous, but I do acknowledge that travel is a two-sided arrangement and that if travelers are going to make demands of the industry we should be willing to give something in return. Yes, we’re the ones paying the bills, but most of us need travel more than travel needs us. By way of finding a negotiating point, perhaps we as travelers could begin by correcting some of the behavior that aggravates an industry already worn to the nub by the non-stop demands of a complaint-minded public who loves nothing more than pointing a litigious finger of blame every time a fly winds up in an ice cube or a drunk is refused a drink. I’ll get the ball rolling by identifying an area of passenger comportment in critical need of improvement.

Although babies who belong to people I don’t know are often a pain in the ass, I accept that they are necessary to the propagation of the species, that spending my tax dollars on their future schools indirectly benefits me by helping to maintain a working and literate society, and that apparently they must all now fly like Saudi royalty everywhere they go. (I personally didn’t see the inside of an aircraft until my parents were confident that I knew how to feed myself and shut up the instant I was instructed to do so, but they were of a lost generation to whom things like social manners and public dignity actually mattered.) I also accept that babies, particularly when exposed to the dry and pressurized stress of an airborne environment, have a tendency to cry and are deserving of my sympathy.

What I find intolerable, however, is a solution that’s worse than the problem. By this I refer to the incessant shushing and cooing of parents who, primarily for the benefit of annoyed fellow passengers, put on a showy though inevitably vain effort to quiet the uncontrollable, twenty-two-pound monster forced to sit in their laps for the entire journey from Skowhegan, Maine to Kauai because they were too cheap to buy it a separate ticket. No amount of baby talk or off-key lullaby’ing has ever stopped a single baby on an airplane from doing everything it could, for as long as it could, to sound like Christina Aguilera sticking a butter knife in a light socket. A baby will stop crying when it’s fed or when it’s good and ready to stop crying. Screaming infants I can take. This—“Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! I don’t know what’s gotten into him, he’s never this fussy! Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”—I cannot. Nor should the flight attendant who just ruptured my knee with the beverage cart have to.

The latest issue of Esquire printed a short thing I did called “A Few Music-related Discussion Questions.” I’d originally written a longer piece; below is the full list, including all of the entries that appeared in the magazine as well as those that didn’t make the cut.

A Few Music-related Discussion Questions

There was once a time when we stayed up all night chain smoking and discussing the social application of music, not caring in the least about peripheral issues such as copyright infringement or the industry’s collapsing business model. In a humble effort to redirect our foundering appreciation of music’s cultural relevance, we herewith present this short list of burning topics. Discuss.

Is it possible to issue a call to arms to Generation Apathy and, if so, can a manifesto be any more dickless than John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change”?

In light of such innovations as Facebook and Thomas Friedman, is “World Music” any longer a valid designation?

Is Remi Nicole’s “I prefer Rock N Roll” this decade’s “I Love Rock and Roll”? Or just this year’s “Hey Ya”? [Postscript: I suppose it’s time to admit I was wrong about the explosion in popularity I expected for this single, but it’s still a great song worth youtubing.]

Has hip-hop become that unbearable or have we just grown old and predictable together? Follow-up: Is it possible to be obnoxious and boring at the same time?

How come the best song about Iraq—Andrew Bird’s “How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm?”—was actually written during World War I?

Name a guitarist under 30 who is as good or famous as Hendrix, Page, Townsend, and Van Halen were at age twenty. Explain why you are unable to do this.

Given that they are composed and arranged by some of our most brilliant musicians, shouldn’t movie scores be considered the classical music of our age?

When will the “Imagine Alice Cooper slamming mojitos in Martin Denny’s basement while Dr. Dre and that Feist chick make out in a corner to the sounds of Slash and Shooter Jennings tuning up” form of music criticism fucking die already?

Now that Taco Bell is using Joe Jackson’s “One More Time” to move enchiritos, will the punk generation stand by while its most treasured musical touchstones are raped on the altar of commercialism the way Baby Boomers have already grown accustomed to doing?

Which performer bears more responsibility for the death of jazz: Kenny G or Wynton Marsalis?

Is American Idol successful simply because we like to laugh at pathetic losers, or because it’s almost impossible to find real singers on pop radio anymore?

A. Almost all of us own some Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, or Willie Nelson. B. Or at least appreciate the idea of the aforementioned informing our musical landscape. C. Despite what you may have heard, Nashville is filled with incredibly talented songwriters and musicians. D. And many hot female singers. E. Dierks Bentley is a genuinely likable performer. F. Tim McGraw and Faith Hill openly revile George Bush, so they ain’t all lockstepping Limbaugh slurpers. G. So why do many of you still refuse on principle to listen to country music?

Is the popularity of shuffle the inevitable and perhaps comforting byproduct of a society and political system increasingly paralyzed by random, inexplicable events that render its citizens feeling powerless in the face of their own doomed lives? And is anyone else sick of it yet?

The latest issue of Esquire printed a short thing I wrote called “A Few Music-related Discussion Questions.” I’d originally written a longer piece; below is the full list, including all of the entries that appeared in the magazine as well as those that didn’t make the cut.

A Few Music-related Discussion Questions

There was once a time when we stayed up all night chain smoking and discussing the social application of music, not caring in the least about peripheral issues such as copyright infringement or the industry’s collapsing business model. In a humble effort to redirect our foundering appreciation of music’s cultural relevance, we herewith present this short list of burning topics. Discuss.

Is it possible to issue a call to arms to Generation Apathy and, if so, can a manifesto be any more dickless than John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change”?

In light of such innovations as Facebook and Thomas Friedman, is “World Music” any longer a valid designation?

Is Remi Nicole’s “I prefer Rock N Roll” this decade’s “I Love Rock and Roll”? Or just this year’s “Hey Ya”? [Postscript: I suppose it’s time to admit I was wrong about the explosion in popularity I expected for this single, but it’s still a great song worth youtubing.]

Has hip-hop become that unbearable or have we just grown old and predictable together? Follow-up: Is it possible to be obnoxious and boring at the same time?

How come the best song about Iraq—Andrew Bird’s “How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm?”—was actually written during World War I?

Name a guitarist under 30 who is as good or famous as Hendrix, Page, Townsend, and Van Halen were at age twenty. Explain why you are unable to do this.

Given that they are composed and arranged by some of our most brilliant musicians, shouldn’t movie scores be considered the classical music of our age?

When will the “Imagine Alice Cooper slamming mojitos in Martin Denny’s basement while Dr. Dre and that Feist chick make out in a corner to the sounds of Slash and Shooter Jennings tuning up” form of music criticism fucking die already?

Now that Taco Bell is using Joe Jackson’s “One More Time” to move enchiritos, will the punk generation stand by while its most treasured musical touchstones are raped on the altar of commercialism the way Baby Boomers have already grown accustomed to doing?

Which performer bears more responsibility for the death of jazz: Kenny G or Wynton Marsalis?

Is American Idol successful simply because we like to laugh at pathetic losers, or because it’s almost impossible to find real singers on pop radio anymore?

A. Almost all of us own some Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, or Willie Nelson. B. Or at least appreciate the idea of the aforementioned informing our musical landscape. C. Despite what you may have heard, Nashville is filled with incredibly talented songwriters and musicians. D. And many hot female singers. E. Dierks Bentley is a genuinely likable performer. F. Tim McGraw and Faith Hill openly revile George Bush, so they ain’t all lockstepping Limbaugh slurpers. G. So why do many of you still refuse on principle to listen to country music?

Is the popularity of shuffle the inevitable and perhaps comforting byproduct of a society and political system increasingly paralyzed by random, inexplicable events that render its citizens feeling powerless in the face of their own doomed lives? And is anyone else sick of it yet?

I did an interview with a German newspaper this past week. A number of the questions the reporter asked were similar to those that have come up in the Q&A portion of appearances I’ve been doing to promote Smile When You’re Lying. Given that there seems to be widespread interest in these sorts of issues, I thought I’d post a few of the questions and answers.

Q: Every time I read about travel and resorts in German newspapers, the cheapest hotel costs around 100 Euros, the flight is 1,200 Euros. I ask myself: Who has the money to spend on holiday in these places? Why don’t they write about cheaper possibilities?

A: They don’t write about cheaper possibilities because the businesses that support cheap travel (local restaurants, inexpensive modes of transport, single-owner hotels, etc.) don’t have the money to advertise. Travel publications and travel sections of newspapers exist in significant ways as the megaphone of their advertisers. So, if Four Seasons buys $100,000 worth of advertisements in a certain publication, what hotel do you think the publication is going to write about? A mom-and-pop guesthouse can never afford to advertise in a Western magazine or newspaper. But the Raffles Hotel in Singapore can. That’s why you get “tips” advising you to go to the Raffles in Singapore, and not a one-room hut.

The best travel magazine I ever worked for was called Escape. It was published out of Los Angeles. Escape was trying to be a magazine for the Lonely Planet type of traveler — out-of-the-way destinations, stories about independent travel, maximizing cultural experiences. It was a terrific magazine and had many loyal readers, but it went out of business because it couldn’t sell advertising to the kinds of places it was telling its readers to go to. Readers are important, but ultimately magazines are kept in business by advertising money.

Q: What role does PR play?

A: It’s an extension of advertising. Advertising dollars get a magazine’s attention. PR people are the second wave that come in to “help” the publication push its editorial content in the direction that most pleases the advertiser.

Example: A Caribbean country’s tourist board commits to $250,000 worth of advertising to be spread over a one-year period. A month or two later, a PR representative from that country’s tourist board calls the magazine’s ad director and says, “I’ve got a great idea for a story about a new golf course and four-star resort that are opening three months from now on our island.” The ad director says, “Great idea!” The ad director has a meeting with the editor in chief during which he or she reminds the editor in chief of the $250,000 ad buy.

The editor in chief delegates the story to a staff editor, who in turn assigns the golf-course-four-star-resort story to a writer. The primary contact given to the writer is the PR representative who initiated the story. The writer calls the PR rep. The PR rep arranges the writer’s trip (air fare, hotels, food, booze, round of golf, maybe a golf lesson with the club pro, everything paid for by the PR agency). The writer takes the trip, tours the new facility, and has a genuinely nice time and writes his or her glowing account of the wonderful trip. The magazine gets a nice story and advertising dollars, the Caribbean country gets some nice promotion, the PR agency earns the trust of its client and a feather in its cap to flaunt to prospective new clients about its insider contacts. Everyone is happy. (And by the way, that word “commit” up there is important because it gives the advertiser the opportunity to withdrawal the remainder of its advertising buy for any reason; for example, in the event the publication in question prints something the advertiser doesn’t like.)

Now, did anyone “lie” in this exchange? Not really. But when he or she flips through the pages, the reader usually has no idea of the process, not to mention the $250,000 account, that led to the story about the new hotel and golf course they’re reading.

Q: You mentioned Lonely Planet. When you travel for example in Thailand nearly everyone has a Lonely Planet. Are you sick of this?

A: I wrote critically of Lonely Planet’s self-righteous attitude in my book and I was sort of surprised to get a lot of supportive reaction from people who agreed with me. For whatever reason, I thought my dissatisfaction with Lonely Planet was somewhat rare. But I don’t begrudge LP for its success, which I think it earned in an honest way. But, yeah, it has become sort of a victim of its own success. It’s like the old Yogi Berra line: “That place has gotten so popular that nobody goes there anymore.”

Five Great Travel Books and One Reasonable Request

While I was editor of Travelocity magazine (2000-01), we published an ambitious piece titled “The 100 Best Travel Books Ever Written.” The list included the expected heavyweights — Twain, Theroux, Chatwin, McPhee, Heat-Moon, Bryson — alongside unexpected picks by writers such as James Fenton, Michael Crichton, and Dr. Suess. I like to remind people of this list because, particularly in the wake of the publication of "Smile When You’re Lying," I’ve occasionally been accused of having it in for travel writers. And while it’s true that there are few things I enjoy complaining about more than bad travel writing, there are few things I enjoy reading more than good travel writing. Since short of combing through the stacks of files in my basement it’s almost impossible to unearth a copy of the long-forgotten January/February 2001 issue of Travelocity magazine, here’s a short selection of travel books I admire, each published since 2000.

The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia
By Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi
More than any book I know, this compendium of The eXile, a biweekly English-language Moscow tabloid founded by the authors (Taibbi now writes even sharper copy as a political columnist for Rolling Stone) sums up the thrilling, tedious, and difficult life of expats, from meeting the “Mongolian Dennis Rodman” to the dead return to “dull, sexless America.”

Trials of the Monkey: An Accidental Memoir
By Matthew Chapman
Like all good travel writing, Chapman uses his destination as mere starting point for a story broad enough to take in a number of topics — in this case, science, religion, education, and his own history. The great-great grandson of Charles Darwin, Englishman Chapman travels to exotic Dayton, Tennessee, site of the Scopes-Monkey Trial, to understand both sides of the argument his ancestor so infamously began.

Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile’s Pilgrimage to the Mother Country
By Joe Queenan
I just opened my copy to find a good line and here’s what was on the first random page I looked at: “The current occupant of the throne, Elizabeth II, has presided with great aplomb and dignity over the gradual but inevitable disintegration of the British Empire. Neither flashy nor communicative, this paragon of bourgeoisie taste and homespun attire seems like a very nice old lady who has had the misfortune to be hemmed in by a self-replicating battalion of ding-dongs.” I love Queenan because you can open to just about any page of his books and find gems like that.

Boeing Versus Airbus: The Inside Story of the Greatest International Competition in Business
By John Newhouse
More of a business book than a travel book, but Newhouse is so good at relating the inside details of the dramatic rivalry between the aviation giants that you learn a lot about modern travel in the process. In discussions of America’s trade deficits and export imbalances, few people realize that Boeing is the United States’ number-one exporter and has been for fifty years. We need to pay attention to this stuff.

Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
By Chuck Klosterman
At some point in his/her life, every freelancer in America will try to talk an editor into funding a self-indulgent “Road trip across America” story. Klosterman is one of the few writers good enough to land the dream gig and then sharp and funny enough to turn the trip into a book you can read three or four times and still laugh at. Klosterman’s journey to places where famous rockers met their demise (Buddy Holly, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Kurt Cobain, etc.) gets diverted in favor of impromptu side trips to visit ex-girlfriends and sample the gastronomic delights of Cracker Barrel.

Closed on Sunday: And Other Pleasant Surprises For the Small-Town Lutheran
By Garrison Keillor
OK, I made up the title. This book doesn’t exist. But since Garrison Keillor is the modern Mark Twain, and since he’s been around the world many times over, if he’d ever break down and do a travel book, I’m certain it’d instantly appear at the top of lists like this one.

I picked up a voice mail this morning from a distraught Shanghai Bob telling me that George MacDonald Fraser had passed away. In a way, I’m glad I wasn’t there to receive the call—it would have been a tough one to get through and, anyway, not long before I’d received the same news (cancer) in an email from Nicholas Latimer at Knopf.

I wish I had it in me to write the kind of eulogy that Fraser deserves, but I know many others with a stronger connection to the great man will deliver those in the coming weeks. I will look for them online. What I can do, in the meantime, is post an interview I conducted with Fraser in December 1999. The story originally appeared in a 2000 issue of American Way magazine. Following the convention of the magazine, it has a somewhat overlong introduction and regrettably short Q&A section. However, if you aren’t already a Fraser or Flashman fan, perhaps the intro will serve as a decent primer.

As for the Shanghai Bob connection, I can only say that while struggling through a difficult and often socially barren year in Japan alongside Bob and our mutual friend Robert Glasser (both Shanghai Bob and Glasser make several appearances in “Smile When You’re Lying”), Flashman and Fraser’s other books quite literally helped us make it through the dark days. Through his books, I think all of us experienced that most strange and satisfying byproduct of the reader’s life—getting to know and become “friends” (of a sort) with someone they've never met. Fraser’s books had that kind of personal impact on people and his way of facing every situation, no matter how grave, with a sense of humor certainly had an impact on my way of thinking about writing and, indeed, living. That sort of perspective was much needed that year in Japan.

Fraser is beloved around the world, but he has a particularly large fan base among expats. I don’t say this simply because it was as an expat that I discovered Fraser, but because his outsider’s outlook, irreverence, and subversive wit aligns so perfectly with the sensibilities of many Westerners who often find themselves in tricky situations abroad. Meeting Fraser and conducting this interview in the lobby of a London hotel will always be one of the great thrills and privileges of my professional life.

Hed: GMF (TK)

Subhed: After a four-year hiatus, Victorian rake Harry Flashman is back in a new novel by the master of military tales from Balaclava to Burma.

By modern standards, George MacDonald Fraser might be considered a lunatic. It's a description he'd probably approve of. For three decades the British author has used military loonies, unpopular causes, and some of history's most infamous characters as the unlikely basis of his wildly popular Flashman novels. Now, at 75, Fraser is smiling along with legions of Flashman addicts as the series' latest installment—Flashman and the Tiger, the eleventh volume, is the first in four years—is set to be published in the United States.

A collection of three stories, Tiger differs in format from the usual full-length novels, but is filled with the comedic villainy, cowardice, and amoral antics that have earned Sir Harry Flashman a worldwide following. The fictional Victorian-era British officer puts his usual irreverent, eyewitness spin on historical events and figures, fleeing from Zulu warriors, trading insults with Oscar Wilde ("an overfed trout in a toupé"), traveling on 1883's maiden run of the Orient Express, dragooned into service in Africa, and quivering alongside the brave (and crazy) British defenders of Rorke's Drift in an action that would become a Victorian legend.

Comedy may be Fraser's trump suit, but his hole card is keen attention to historical minutiae and scholarly eloquence. Quartered Safe Out Here, Fraser's autobiography of his WW II service in Burma, ranks among the best military writing ever—an excerpt appears in the landmark collection of war writing, The Book of War, in which editor John Keegan, probably the world's most-respected living military historian, calls Fraser's memoir "one of the classic literary achievements of the Second World War, indeed of any war." His three volumes of McAuslan stories are among the most heartbreaking and hilarious depictions of the decaying world of the British Empire. Screen credits include The Three Musketeers and the James Bond film Octopussy.

Born in Carlisle, Scotland, Fraser fought in Burma in 1945, left the military in 1947, and worked as a newspaperman in Canada and the U.K. until one day telling his wife he was "going to write us out" of a stable but predictable future. His first book—Flashman—was published in 1969. Taken for the historical send-up it was in Britain, America didn't get the joke at first. Many reviewers, confused by the legit historical documentation, mistook the fictional Flashman for an authentic figure and reviewed the book as straight history. The mess was soon sorted out by a smiling Fraser, and a growing legion has been smiling ever since.

In person, Fraser is a surprise. Neither irascible nor argumentative like his title characters, he is warm and friendly. Living with his wife on the Isle of Man, Fraser is a barely graying veteran now settled comfortably into extra pounds, easy laughter and stories of dash and daring that credit the tradition of Scottish adventure writers from Sir Walter Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson to Arthur Conan Doyle.

AW: How does the new Flashman stack up against the others?

GMF: I'm never happy with the last one. Never. And I'm just surprised that it's outselling the others [in the U.K.]. I'm told that every new Flashman has outsold the previous one.

AW: Is it fair to call these books male fantasies?

GMF: I suppose so. They're escapist. They're adventure stories.

AW: Flashman collects enemies and girlfriends with equal efficiency. Have you got favorites?

GMF: The best villain I think I've done is John Charity Spring, the Oxford don [Flash for Freedom!, Flashman and the Angel of the Lord]. I may have been a little hard on Otto Bismarck [Royal Flash], though no harder than he probably deserved. As for women, the mad queen of Madagascar [Flashman's Lady] is a very interesting one. She must have been an awful cow. (Laughs) But, I would say that Flashman's favorite is the Rani of Jhansi. [Flashman in the Great Game] There are pictures of her. She was stunningly beautiful and a very interesting woman. No one is sure about her character—whose side she was on in the Indian Mutiny and so on—but she was entirely virtuous as far as I can see. Although Flashman thinks she wasn't. And I had to explain this in a footnote.

AW: The footnotes are really the secret weapon of the series, aren't they?

GMF: They were just sort of an idea in the first couple of books. And then I realized that in fact this was a good way of filling in history. I mean, I could go back now and do 40 footnotes for the first book, but I had probably about 15. It just didn't occur to me to do more. But people like them. And it's a good way of getting the truth across.

AW: Is there any truth to the running speculation that Flashman's Civil War exploits are written and tucked away in a drawer?

GMF: No, that isn't true. It's a long time ago that I wrote his Who's Who entry and had him on both sides of the U.S. Civil War. And I've been stuck with that ever since. I've done a lot of research for it, I just haven't got down to committing it to paper. But I know what roughly is going to happen. That might be the next one.

AW: What would Flashman think of modern England?

GMF: Not much. We have had a succession of real rubbish in parliament. Never more so than now. They've turned the country into an open sewer, frankly. I know I sound like an old reactionary and indeed in many ways I am. The worst thing, of course, is that we have been betrayed into Europe. You know, this European Union thing. It's a personal opinion of mine that our natural alliance is and always has been with the United States. And should remain that way. We have nothing in common with the French, the Germans. And I have got into very nasty trouble by saying that I am very reluctant to see our laws interfered with or dictated by the children of the people who gave us Belsen and Dachau.

AW: The National Review published an essay of yours that included typically controversial views on Lady Diana.

GMF: I was sickened by the public's behavior when Princess Diana died. Let's face it, if she looked like the back of a bus it never would have happened, there never would have been that kind of outpouring. That should have sent the feminists into a great rage. But it didn't. But here's this young woman and she's getting this huge amount of attention and people are beating their breasts and weeping. They didn't do that over Churchill when he died. OK, he'd had a long life. But even Kennedy didn't get this kind of thing. And he was a president.

AW: In your autobiography Quartered Safe Out Here, the man you call Captain Grief seems to have lent some qualities of lunacy and heroism to the British military figures in Flashman books.

GMF: The Second World War was full of guys like that. Mad as bloody hatters, you know. I don't know why. It seems to be a sort of British military type. You get people like [Charles] Wingate and General [Charles] Gordon and so on, and they are nuts!

AW: After the rigors of becoming an officer, why didn't you follow through with a military career?

GMF: Because what's the point of being a soldier in peacetime? For a Scottish highlander—which I am—there are three good reasons for fighting. One is briefly in a good cause. Another is for money. And the third is for fun. And in peacetime you don't have much opportunity for any of them.

AW: Are fans disappointed to find that you're not like Flashman?

GMF: They're disappointed to find that I'm not six feet two inches tall and extremely handsome and distinguished looking. (Laughs) For one thing, I'm not English, I'm Scottish. And I'm writing about this polished, charming English cad and I'm obviously not. To that extent, it is a disappointment. No, I'm not like him. I couldn't stand the pace. Who could?

AW: Does Flashman represent your alter-ego?

GMF: No, I've never had the slightest desire to be like Flashman and I think my military experience killed any particular idea of derring-do. There was a young lady this morning at a book shop who told me about playing a game at a dinner party asking men who they would like to be and three of them said Flashman. Now, I don't know that they'd thought hard about it, but I don't think they'd really like to be Flashman.

AW: Royal Flash was made into a movie with Malcolm McDowell long ago. Has there been any recent interest in a Flashman movie?

GMF: Oh, yes, all the time. But Royal Flash is the only one that doesn't involve great race movements and battles and crowds of extras. They would be murderously expensive to do. I can't say I'm all that keen on the idea. Because the film or the television of the book seldom does justice to the book. Anyway, who's going to play Flashman? Errol Flynn's dead a long time ago, you know? And I don't see anyone of that style around now.

David Gutowksi, the impresario behind Largehearted Boy, recently asked me to contribute to his blog. Largehearted Boy is an inventive site that, among other things, has writers provide a “soundtrack” to go along with their books. I’ll paste the first few songs I chose for Smile When You’re Lying and then provide the Largehearted Boy link to the rest of my “soundtrack.”

Since Smile When You’re Lying is basically a memoir masquerading as a travel book, and since numerous songs are referenced throughout, it’s easy to come up with an accompanying “soundtrack” pegging songs to specific chapters. The trick will be keeping it concise. There’s a great moment in Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live in which Klosterman tries to decide what CDs to bring along on a (pre-iPod) road trip—after punishing rounds of cuts, and mindful of limited car space, he finally decides to pack a mere 600 CDs. No promises, but I’ll try to keep my list slightly more manageable.

Intro: You Deserve Better
“Li’l Darling” — Count Basie
A rare chapter that presents no obvious musical cues, so I’ll take the opportunity to list a transcendent ballad written by Neal Hefti, one of those sadly forgotten geniuses of American song (spanning generations, he later wrote the “Batman” theme). I was introduced to Count Basie by a high school band teacher named Stan Sells and have never stopped buying his records (Count Basie’s, not Stan Sells’).

Chapter 1: “Welcome to Thailand, Ulysses S. Grant!”
“Tomorrow People” — Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers
This chapter deals with a trip to Thailand in 1988. You couldn’t go anywhere in Bangkok that summer without hearing Ziggy Marley or Tracy Chapman. I bought pirated cassettes of both and paid a cabbie to drive me around for an hour while I looked at the dysfunction out the window and listened to “Fast Car” and “Revolution” and “Tomorrow People.” This before all my cash was stolen and I could no longer afford to so brazenly laugh in the face of Peak Oil. (We’re all doomed, by the way.)

Chapter 2: Baked Alaska: How Drugs, Tourism, and Petroleum Tamed the Last Frontier
“Fight or Fall” — Thin Lizzy
“Black Market” — Weather Report
“After the Lovin’” — Engelbert Humeprdink
Thin Lizzy comes as tribute to everyone who ever sparked a doob in the woods outside Floyd Dryden Jr. High. As explained in the book, I wasn’t among the wool-encased hipster trendsetters in halibut jackets (you may have to be from Southeast Alaska to get that reference), but I did love their music.

I spent a large chunk of my early youth as an inveterate jazz snob; insufferable in a 15-year-old, but there you are. Weather Report represents 70s jazz fusion, the most unfairly maligned genre in music history. In high school, I obsessed over bands and musicians like Weather Report, Pat Metheny, Jeff Lorber, Herbie Hancock, Stanley Clarke, etc. Given that this period of pop music was dominated by the likes of Loverboy, Scorpions, AC/DC, and Pink Floyd, it might not surprise you to learn that I didn’t notch a single date in high school. Even so, as the inclusion here demonstrates, I hold no grudge against Joe Zawinul and Jaco Pastorius.

“After the Lovin’” because “adult contemporary” was the only type of music Juneau’s two identical radio stations played back in the day and, I don’t know, it’s either a cool sing or the repetition brainwashed me.

Chapter 3: Canned Hams, Kendo Beatdowns, and the Penis Olympics—The Education of an Accidental Ambassador in Japan
“Headstart for Happiness” — The Style Council
With a certain age group of British men, it’s possible to start a fight simply by walking into a pub and declaring that The Style Council was in fact a better band than The Jam. (True, by the way.) Life in Japan fired my suicidal imagination like no other place and there were dark weekends there when only my discovery of Paul Weller’s new and improved incarnation pulled me through.

To read the rest of this piece, go to: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2007/12/book_notes_chuc_2.html