Black Ajax by George MacD Fraser
A Thoughtful and Entertaining Novel from the Creator of "Flashman"
Black Ajax is the latest novel by George MacDonald Fraser, the creator of the hugely successful Flashman series. Fraser’s cheery and cowardly antihero Harry Flashman doesn’t appear in Black Ajax, though his father, “Mad Buck” Flashman, does, recalling the days of the Regency, when he “discovered” Tom Molineaux, the black prize-fighter who challenged Tom Cribb for the heavyweight championship of all England.
Buck Flashman is far from the only narrative voice in Black Ajax. The book is made up of a series of interviews, letters, monologues, and excerpts which tell Molineaux’s story from his first fight in Virginia to his matches with Cribb, and eventual decline and death. The voices are fascinatingly various, from “Paddington” Jones, Molineaux’s trainer, to Tom Hazlitt the famous essayist and critic, through butlers, prizefighters, a French-American nobleman and a Regency sportswriter. At no point do we hear Molineaux’s own voice, only what others say of him.
This is a risky technique, especially for an author more famous for his fightin’, drinkin’, rogerin’ historical novels. It could be easy to dismiss Black Ajax as an attempt by a genre writer to break into “serious” novels, with the novel’s themes of racial prejudice and the switching narrative voice as a cheap gimmick. However, Black Ajax is enthrallingly written, with each voice carefully individual and larded with contemporary slang. One of the high points is the character of Bill Richmond, the mixed–race “dingy Christian” fighter who hates Molineaux because he won’t train hard enough to win the heavyweight championship “which the white man believes belongs to him alone.”
Complex and Interesting Characters
The complex ways which the other characters exploit Molineaux are skilfully sketched: using him as a fashionable accessory, a meal-ticket, a political symbol, a sexual plaything. This could be pretty heavy going if it wasn’t for George MacDonald Fraser’s flair for voices, which can handle the pedantic pretension of Hazlitt and the rage of Bill Richmond, and make them both equally entertaining to read.
Black Ajax is a social novel as well as an exploration of character; it records a brief period when prizefighting, despite being brutal and illegal, was a wildly fashionable interest of high society, and “milling coves” were the talk of London. Fraser isn’t Heyer, however, and he isn’t swept away by the opportunity to describe “Prinny” and his circle, preferring instead to examine those, like Buck Flashman, who didn’t quite belong in fashionable society.
Boxing Matches as Metaphors
Boxing matches have often been seen as representing something more than just a sporting occasion. Norman Mailer spent an entire book (The Fight) describing the Foreman-Ali “Rumble in the Jungle”, and the Rocky franchise depends on a tendency to see boxing matches as symbolic, even as the clash of different cultures. Despite the feelings of the fighters, the Joe Louis- Max Schmeling fight was inevitably discussed as a battle between ideologies. Though it purposefully never lets us inside Tom Molineaux’s head, Black Ajax, gives us an enthralling insight into this kind of thinking – admitting its force, whilst picking it apart by showing the results for the fighter and the world around him.
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