In a significant departure from his previous fascination with 60s and 70s British gangsters and glam rockers, Jake Arnott turns his attention to the unlikely convergence of two historical figures in Paris, 1903. Aleister Crowley may be better to known to many as the subject of an Ozzy Osbourne song (“Mr Crowley, won’t you ride my white horse, Mr Crowley, it’s symbolic of course”) than as the occultist, writer, poet and mountaineer he was; while Major General Sir Hector Macdonald is a now obscure hero of the British Empire who served in Egypt, Sudan and South Africa. The encounter that forms the core of the book, remarkably enough, actually happened, but Arnott has used his considerable powers of imagination to speculate on what form it might have taken and what this mismatched pair got up to.

Hector Macdonald was an unusual soldier in the context of the British Army, having risen up from the ranks – it made him something of an outcast within the officer’s mess, and a posting to Ceylon late in his career was cut short by rumours of a number of homosexual indiscretions with the natives. In despair after receiving short shrift from the King and the Head of the Army in London, Macdonald is in Paris to look up an old comrade, in a last desperate attempt to secure a new posting and somehow remove the opprobrium of the charges against him. That’s when Aleister Crowley puts himself in the picture.

Crowley, best remembered now as a Satanist, is in Paris on business of his own. Arnott portrays him as having a sincere belief in all of the occult claptrap that he devoted so much of his time to – grimoires, magical squares, spells and incantations, black masses and the like. Of course, there are some aspects of ‘magic’ that are rooted in the physical world, such as hallucinogenic drugs – so when Crowley manages to feed Macdonald spiked almonds, it’s the trigger for an extended series of flashbacks to key events in the General’s past, including his guilt over the fate of several native Sudanese troops who he became entangled with during his service there, and his troubled relationship with another hero of the Empire, Lord Kitchener. Influenced by the drugs, the journey of the two unlikely companions through the Paris night embraces a run in with Crowley’s former mentor, an eventful dinner with a number of larger-than-life companions, a Black Mass and a visit to a brothel, before the two men go their separate ways.

Arnott has done as good a job as anyone can of imagining what it would have been like to be a fly on the wall for the meeting of this unlikely pair, and it makes for an enjoyable and compelling read. Macdonald, never fully at ease either with his sexuality or his military elevation, is a sympathetic character who has reached his nadir when Crowley encounters him; and despite his massive ego and laughable occult notions, Crowley, on some level, seems to provide the General with a kind of relief, however temporary. The Devil’s Paintbrush succeeds as imaginative entertainment, but as good historical fiction should, it also stimulates the desire to learn more about the people, places and events described.

Postscript: you can learn more about Hector Macdonald on Wikipedia, but it would be hard to read the entry without spoiling the end of the book. Hector Macdonald on Wikipedia (contains spoilers)

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