The Beguiling

It was only when he came to in the hospital three days later to find his hands amputated that Zoltán recalled what movie the whole sordid incident had reminded him of: But in The Beguiled, a bizarre 1970 Civil War gothic, Clint Eastwood's horndog Yankee soldier who wakes up to discover both his legs missing got what audiences thought he deserved: the Valkyrie-like wrath of woman scorned.

I remember reading Zsuzsi Gartner's previous book of short stories (Better Living Through Plastic Explosives) and loving it, so was excited to see what she would do with the novel form here in The Beguiling; in my experience, authors don't always excel equally at both formats. And Gartner pulls off a slick trick here: By conceiving of a fascinating and original frame story, the main character meets a bunch of other people who essentially tell her a wide range of beguiling short stories, and we readers get to have our cake and eat it too. And to be sure, the frame story felt increasingly tricksy for tricks' sake to me as it went along, but it eventually got to a place that proves the entire tale couldn't have been told any other way. Funny, bizarre, thoughtful, and jolting; this was a weird and satisfying ride. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

If this were merely another story of domestic or maternal discontent, there would be little point in dredging back through it all as if dragging a lake for a long-decomposed body. Oh, wretched me oh my, first-world problems, smart women bad choices, blah blah blah. Leave it to the fishes, the bottom-dwellers with their prickly whiskers. Leave the bones in peace to settle into the silt and accumulate barnacles.

Lucy's favourite person growing up was her cousin Zoltán – a soft-bodied, perennially friend-zoned lover of old movies and all around good boy – and shortly after Kinkos, the laughing yoga instructor, the Thing and its aftermath, strangers started approaching Lucy and telling her their darkest secrets: some criminal, some merely embarrassing, Lucy somehow becoming “a confession magnet, a lay confessor. A flesh-and-blood Wailing Wall.” Whereas Gartner's earlier book was (as I remember) a collection of strange stories centered on Canadian suburbia, the stories that the confessants share in The Beguiling are more global: still strange, still plenty of Canadiana, but also set in places like Denmark, Ireland, and Australia, too. We follow along with Lucy for thirteen years into her future, witnessing how the confessions – as much as she grows to crave them – disrupt her life, and despite me not wanting to give away any spoilers, I think I can add how delighted I was when the ending made me reconsider everything that had happened up to that point.

“If you love something, let it go. If it comes back, it's yours. If it doesn't, it never was.” Maybe it's like that with unicorns and boyfriends, but words, once loosed into the world, become wild animals. When you flee from a wolf, you run into a bear.

With a blend of the surreal and the Gothic, words matter here. Gartner invokes the mythic and folkloric (Little Red Riding Hood, mermaids, the cave witch) and recurring, curious themes like wabi-sabi (that's how the light gets in), small men, tall women, and missing limbs. She makes social commentary:

These days the erasure of history, once the province of despots, is easily available to anyone with a Twitter account and a sense of outrage. The past is fair game all over the political spectrum; history in flux, as mutable as the future. The past a choose-your-own-adventure story. Each of your lives a deck of cards shuffled and reshuffled until the ace of spades turns up. If you're playing poker, that is, and not solitaire. If you can afford a deck of cards.

And conjures imagery that resonated deep within me:

The heart beats on the wrong side: somatic dyslexia. The spine a winding railway track unconnected to any stations. The hips smart as if bruised at the bone, but the skin remains unmarked. Bones themselves porous as coral skeletons. The freighted liver, a bulbous fangtooth fish. And the rest of my organs like more of those creatures found in the darkest depths of the oceans: the gulper eel, the baleful black sea devil, the tubeworms and other abyssal giants.

I don't want to risk spoilers by saying too much more but will reiterate that this novel is a little twisted but paid off in the end for me.

Further to the added remarks on my last post (on a book about Jung's theory of synchronicity and Mallory's offense when I explained that the author's stance was to dismiss the phenomenon as unscientific), Mallory came into the room where I was reading The Beguiling just as I had read:

Were these synchronicities turning out to be significant or was that too Jungian a way of looking at it? Was I merely in the grip of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (in which Baader and Meinhof themselves made cameos!) or was there something to be gleaned from these chance encounters – a purpose to my bearing witness?

Now, just like last time, Mal had come to fetch me to do yoga, and when I read her that passage, she said, "I'm not saying it means anything, but the theme of today's practise is 'believe'." As it turns out (and here's the only place I'll put a spoiler for this book), synchronicity and multiverses and "reshuffling the deck" is ultimately the underpinning of The Beguiling, so that's pretty weird to unintentionally read these two books back to back. I'm not saying it means anything, but...

The consolations of quantum physics or the consolations of religion: these are among our limited choices. But isn't any consolation a persistent illusion we force ourselves to believe because the alternative involves staring into the void?