Book Club...13:00 Jul 21 2009
Times Read: 668
The Devil’s Paintbrush focuses on two very different men whose chance encounter in a hotel dining room in the spring of 1903 sets Arnott’s plot in motion. One is Sir Hector Macdonald, a soldier nicknamed Fighting Mac, whose glittering image is about to be irredeemably tarnished by revelations about his private life.
Heroes of empire are not meant to be attracted to men from the supposedly lower races and, if they are, they are most certainly not meant to take them into their beds. Sir Hector has succumbed to temptation, and is heading for court martial and the kind of disgrace that can be wiped out only by disappearing behind a locked door, loaded pistol in hand. His past life has come to seem nothing but hollow play-acting. “Fighting Mac, marching to glory,” he tells friend, “it was all a bloody farce, Eddie. There was always somebody else inside.”
Sir Hector is a hero whose reputation is behind him; the man he meets in the hotel, Aleister Crowley, known as the Beast, will gain a wider fame in the future. For the moment he is an obscure occultist and bohemian but he dreams of greater things. When told of a black magician said to be “the wickedest man in Europe”, Crowley replies, “Only Europe? That’s a meagre ambition for a satanist.”
In future decades, we know, Crowley will go one stage better and be able to cherish his status in the tabloid press as “the wickedest man in the world”, but in Arnott’s narrative he seems rather amiable as devil worshippers go. He knows all about the power of repression (“It’s like the power of steam. It’s what the empire’s built on”) and he wants Macdonald to throw off the last shackles of convention and get in touch with his real self. He persuades the old soldier to confide in him, telling him that he can be safe in “the knowledge that whatever you might have done, I am sure to have done worse”.
Spiking Sir Hector’s drink with hallucinogens, he sends Fighting Mac back to confront his past and his experiences in Kitchener’s war against the followers of the Mahdi. As death surrounds him, and “the Devil’s Paintbrush”, the Maxim gun, splashes red across the canvas of the battlefield, Macdonald’s love for Bakhit, the beautiful black boy who was his manservant, and his other sexual indiscretions, are placed in a different perspective.
Arnott’s tale promises much but, in the end, delivers far less. Compared with the Harry Starks books, The Devil’s Paintbrush seems clumsily constructed. In the worst traditions of the historical novel, Crowley and Macdonald spend a disproportionate amount of their time together telling each other what Arnott has learnt in the course of his research. The plot device that allows Macdonald, drugged by the Beast and riding in a Parisian fiacre, to have visions that sweep him back to the Sudan is a creaky contrivance.
The serendipitous meeting between necromancer and fallen hero (which, according to Crowley in later life, did indeed take place) could have been the focus for a novel that genuinely explored the hypocrisies of empire and the dark forces that bubbled beneath its surface. Instead it has become the starting point for a rather stagy exercise in cod Edwardiana.
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