When writing a Civil War novel, there is usually one thing that you need to have: a division. In most cases, this is a straightforward divide of Northern Yankee soldiers and Southern Confederates. For Thomas Cullinan's "The Beguiled," this is only the start of an even more twisted web of deceit, where everything that 19th century America held dear as they were on the verge of a new era. It's a dark, meticulous book, and it features a leg amputation. Even if it is a slow burn that revels too much in monotonous detail, Cullinan's ability to make everything feel at odds with each other only adds to the paranoia that the readers are likely to face. It's a decent book that shows a more perverse look at the Civil War, but one that maybe lacks a deeper purpose by the end.
John McBurney is a soldier who has run on some bad fortune, finding himself injured on the property of Miss Farnsworth's Seminary for Young Ladies. It's seemingly in the middle of nowhere, whose collected group can be counted on two hands. Nobody even knows that this place exists, save for those who feel sheltered from the outside war. Their only exposure to the violence comes with the distant canon shots. Everyone has their own eccentricities, making things as simple as religion or social interests divide them. The girl who discovers John's injured body is Amelia, who's considered a weirdo for loving to study insects more than social interactions. She's also the closest to someone who sympathizes with John, even though it's agreed that his Yankee status should make him a terrible other in the South.
With exception to John, everyone who lives at the Seminary alternates as narrators, allowing us to get insight into personal journeys as they discover this man. On the surface, it's a divide of Northern and Southern politics made all the more intriguing by the fact that John is the only man in the group. Given that there are housekeepers and girls with different religious backgrounds, it all becomes a potboiler, making the reader wonder if anyone will snap due to one small disagreement. While Farnsworth seems like the voice of reason, she's also the one leading the girls through a leg amputation surgery, which is given literally painful detail. It's the centerpiece of the story, and it's hard not to feel like your leg is starting to be removed.
Cullinan has this gift for making you feel like everyone is an antihero within the story. It isn't just John, who manages to be just as manipulative without both legs. Still, you're constantly finding altered perspectives where we don't get insight into characters so much as looks into how they see each other. There's hot gossip like everyone secretly hates each other. They put up with them for the sake of unity, but it's not always promising to produce friendly results. By the end John's guilt is not fully obvious, making us wonder whom we should trust. If there's any issue, it's that the book is heavily padded in this paranoia that often works, but draws things out to unbearable meandering at other times.
The biggest issue of "The Beguiled" has nothing to do with how perfectly Cullinan walks the tightrope of character reliability. Tonally it feels like a decent embodiment of how torn apart (sometimes literally) the country was during the Civil War. But one has to wonder what the bigger point of everything is. It all plays like a strange revenge horror story, and once you get to the meaty moment, you're left wondering what it symbolized. Was there any bigger point to this story besides building tension? It's what keeps this really good novel from being a timeless book. Everything is already in place to make you invested in a bigger point, but it's not abundantly clear.
"The Beguiled" has a raw and unrepentant look at a society divided, and it's worth checking out if the film versions interested you. With that said, it's a streamlined story of violence and tension that gets by simply on being strange. It's effective, but the reader isn't likely to remember much of the book beyond its incredible centerpiece. The rest is a bit too meandering for its own good, never able to keep the tension alive long enough to be triumphant. It's really good but at the end of the day the execution is more interesting than what he has to say. It's worth it for a tonal experience of a slow burn, but don't expect much satisfaction beyond the visceral, surface-level experience.
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