Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! Zsuzsi Gartner’s The Beguiling does what it says on the cover: It casts a spell. It’s a circus, a carnival, a cabaret, a cornucopia, a performance, a triumph. For me it unlocked that rare and wonderful dream-world feeling that made me drunk and dizzy as it pulled me in and kept me clinging on for the whole of its wild, lyrical twisting ride.
The story focuses on the experiences that protagonist Lucy encounters after the disturbing death of her beloved cousin, Zoltan. The loss changes something in her and from then on she finds that people are drawn to confess their deepest secret guilts. The clever premise propels the narrative into a whistle-stop tour of the darkest moments of other people's lives.
Gartner’s sentences are magnificent, full of richness, perceptive clarity, and moments of truth. But there is an elliptical aspect to her storytelling. Revelations are often tantalisingly held back so that when delivered, I found myself scrabbling to reread the pages leading up to them to look for all the clues I'd missed.
It’s a luxurious experience too. Characters dance and rise and fall and dazzle and deceive; a multi-sensory kaleidoscope of images and scenes come into view as if the author is conducting an orchestra as well as telling a story. Gartner draws on a fabulous reservoir of influences: art and architecture, literature and movies; television and children’s books. Joyce, Keats, Dickens, F Scott Fitzgerald, Bram Stoker, but also Dirty Dancing, Merrie Melodies, Chucky, Beatrix Potter, Nick Cave, Douglas Adams. This is a rich and expansive tapestry, and there’s virtuosity in making the threads work to serve the story.
If you haven’t read any previous Gartner before then this novel is a magnificent way to enter her world, a world where the air can grow ‘sour with disappointment’, where people can look as defeated as helium balloons, flabbily wilting long after the party is over, where characters can speak earnestly of cave witches, where lily pads seethe with resentment, where anger and guilt sit like gargoyles on someone's shoulders, confessions come gunning towards the protagonist like heat-seeking missiles, thoughts float in the sky like little black flies, and where in the end, ‘every living thing has something to divulge.’
With all of its imaginative darknesses, delights, deceits and revelations, there’s a sense of clear-eyed honesty bounding through this novel – the peculiar things that people think and feel, the terrible things they do, the confusion and concealments of the world. It’s a novel that mirrors real life - (reflected in the time it sometimes took me to figure out what was going on, and then even when I thought I'd figured it out, still not being completely sure.)
This is a story full of dark gothic shock, swirled through with proper laugh-out-loud comedy that crept up on me just when I thought my heart was about to stop. It’s not an entirely comfortable or easy read. There’s a sense that Gartner is making us look at things we’d rather not look at, revealing things about human nature that we’d rather not confront, but she makes us brave too. 'Life is so much less disappointing for a pessimist than an optimist.' And still, the world with all its horror and guilt and grief and confusion can suddenly look bright and new ‘as if it has been just cracked from a glossy egg, its fresh resplendent yolk, spilling from the shell.’ She may be pointing us towards the void but crucially, she’s showing us how to laugh in its face.
Review by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald