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Title: The Devil's Paintbrush
Author: Jake Arnott
Narrator: Steven Crossley
Format: Unabridged
Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
Language: English
Release date: 01-01-13
Publisher: Whole Story Audiobooks
Genres: Fiction, Historical
Publisher's Summary:
In a Parisian restaurant Aleister Crowley, the notorious occultist, chances on Major-General Sir Hector McDonald, who is facing ruin in a shocking scandal, and vulnerable to Crowley's curious offer of help.
Follow this unlikely pair on an extraordinary night of revelation and transgression. Be transported to the battlefields of Sudan, the backstreets of Edinburgh, and the sultry tropics of Ceylon. And discover Sir Hector's tragic secret....
Members Reviews:
Is This History?
Arnott is best known for his gritty crime novels set in 60's London and a successful television series based on them. Loosely based on the Krays (real brothers) one of whom is gay, Arnott creates characters who seem to be bad boys, sexual outlaws, and are often quite engaging. Also, they always seem to be trapped in, oppressed by, and fatally not fitting into the English class system. Arnott's temptation, though, has been to write about the historical "characters" as presented in the media, not about the real people. A fatal flaw here.
This novel, Devil's Paintbrush, takes all this back to the turn of the century. Briefly, the protagonist is a (real)English military hero of the colonial/empire day (now forgotten) who was "disgraced" and ends up committing suicide in a Paris hotel. This is all true, and a hundred years ago, so from reading about it, Arnott paints by numbers a picture of a grown man who seemingly drank the cool-aide from Baden Powell and the boy scout handbook.
Off subduing natives in Sudan in boy's book fighting (always "savage" but never described), bravely leading missions of daring-do, never thinking he needed to make a dime off it, as other seem to do, leaving a "wife" stranded back in blighty, never thinking of building some sort of stable life for himself...get the picture, we have a man of the wrong class, weirdly inverted morality, devoted to the (lower class or worse, foreign and dark-skinned) troops, and otherwise acting like an outsized twelve year old.
Then Arnott colors in the caricature outline of the time with the (not that far off) suggestion he is a tortured, in the closet case, who has fevered opium-like dreams of a dead Sudanese/nubian man/boy he once loved (and possibly in some overwrought way went to bed with), prior to some later bedroom misadventure in Sri Lanka - or maybe it was blackmail, or a set-up, whatever, Arnott wastes no time on the "disgrace" since it seemingly was never described at the time.
The action of the book is compressed then into a brief period between his unspeakable but otherwise unknown "disgrace" in his foreign posting, a fevered return to London (where he is supposed to resign and disappear from the face of the earth), only to find that, in a series of humiliating scenes, in fact, his supposed friends and superiors in the command, people he has been loyal to for a long career, all share the view that he's just got to "do the decent thing" and go, someplace, out of sight, for good. Standards must, after all, be maintained.
In this emotional maelstrom, Arnott suggests our hero (you can't call him anything else he is so pure, conflicted and simple minded) runs into the local flaming queen, and in a reprise of Oscar Wilde's exile, makes a break for France (where if only he'd made some money, dash it) he could be in exile, fondling dancing boys up to the first world war, or something.
