Faber and Faber, 2011, 504 p.
Preamble:-
I was moved to read this as it features scenes set at the International Exhibition, Glasgow, 1888, in which I have been interested for decades now. Maps of the centre of the Glasgow of 1888 and of the Exhibition site are provided immediately after the title pages. Curiously the cover – not only on this hardback edition (above) but also the different one on the paperback (below) – has a representation of what looks like the main building for the later Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901 rather than that of 1888. Both of these buildings had domes but the structures flanking them were quite different in appearance, the ones of 1888 being slender and steeple-like, those of 1901 more ornate with the dome surmounted by a sculpture of a winged figure. The gondolier on the back cover is fine. Both Exhibitions had those.
1888 Exhibition
1901 Exhibition
paperback cover
Review:-
Gillespie And I is the story of Londoner (of Scottish extraction) Harriet Baxter’s friendship with the family of up and coming Glasgow artist Ned Gillespie from their first chance meeting up to and beyond the tragedy around which the tale eventually unfolds.
The book is narrated by Baxter from the perspective of her old age with short sections set in her present day of 1933 interspersed with longer ones in 1888-90. At first it seems to be a tale of friendship and possible attraction with comical interludes but later veers off into one of crime/mystery. The narrative voice is flat, with strange choices of word at times. The prose is curiously prone to cliché as well as to repeating information unnecessarily. In addition the narrative’s approach to foreshadowing is unsubtle - it can feel more like being beaten around the head with what’s going to happen. To attribute this to unreliability in Harriet Baxter’s account of events would be the charitable course. Another interpretation would be the narrator’s lack of awareness of how her actions might appear to others. Despite the injunction early on to ignore a Mr Kemp’s recent (in 1933) writings about her past, Baxter’s unreliability is, however, not foregrounded strongly enough – the reference on page 356 to another old – though younger than the narrator – woman’s “ramblings … as though they were facts” comes rather late.
There seems little reason for Baxter’s interest in the Gillespie family. Notwithstanding the book’s title Ned Gillespie is mostly an offstage figure, his wife Annie distracted and naturally suspicious while his mother Elspeth seems to be present to provide humour (but fails.) Their children are also portrayed curiously flatly, the younger daughter never being more than a plot enabler.
The spelling of Timbuktu is odd for a memoir supposedly written in 1933 when it would have been rendered in English as Timbuctoo. The narrative also asserts that Glaswegians call ice-cream “hokey pokey,” which is a new one on me. (“Pokey hat” for an ice cream cone, yes; but never hokey pokey, which is apparently a New Zealand term for puff candy.) It also has women attending a burial. In Scotland, in 1889? That sort of thing was still regarded askance as late as the 1970s. The scene with the Christmas presents also didn’t ring true: until 1958 Christmas was a normal working day in Scotland. That the – relatively expensive – presents were a plot device, that Harris as the author required them, does not outweigh their implausibility.
You may have noticed that when a narrative starts to bug me its infelicities loom large. This is not nit-picking. (Well, it is; but the nits are there.) Such things destroy trust in the author. As they are the author’s rather than the narrator’s responsibility they do not underline any narrative unreliability, instead they fatally undermine the story.
In Gillespie and I Harris has attempted a difficult task. For me, she failed to convince.
