Gillespie and I by Jane Harris
Faber & Faber, $39.99
The opening of Jane Harris' second novel gives little indication of how dark it will become. Harriet Baxter, a woman approaching her 80th year, sits in her London flat in 1933 writing a memoir of events that happened in Glasgow in 1888. We are addressed as "reader", as in a Victorian novel, and the writing is measured and stately, yet there is a tinge of something wild and overwrought.
This, we are told, will be a testament to her "dear friend and soul mate", artist Ned Gillespie, who burned all his paintings and committed suicide. For posterity, she will be the first to record the true story of this "forgotten genius".
The back-story forms the main body of the book, but we never lose touch with its narrator, whose situation will be revealed eventually as the last act of a chilling drama. Its origins begin when the 35-year-old Harriet, freed from the bondage of caring for an elderly aunt, decamps to Scotland to savour her freedom and take in the first Glasgow International Exhibition. A modern woman of independent means, she saves the life of Ned's mother who has fallen down in the street and is choking on her false teeth. A close friendship with the family ensues.
Knowing that Ned will destroy his work and himself, it is intriguing to be introduced not to a tortured genius, but to a stable man with a loving wife and children, and a career which, although not stellar, is moderately successful. Soon, Harriet is practically part of the somewhat chaotic Gillespie household. Ned's wife Annie, also an artist, appreciates her help with the two unruly girls, Sibyl and Rose. Harriet is able to support Ned's work.
"On the surface," she tells us in her even way, "the Gillespies did seem like a fairly stable family. However, ere long, I began to see beneath the facade." Sibyl, Ned's elder daughter, has begun to show signs of neurosis, drawing obscene pictures, smearing excrement on walls, planting sharp objects in her sister's bed. There is disturbing psychology in what follows, but things are not always what they seem. Harris plays with the reader's expectations brilliantly, and to reveal much more of the plot would be criminal. Suffice to say that our growing unease will be justified.
It is with the most subtle sleight-of-hand that Harris brings us to the realisation that we are being manipulated. But by whom? Multi-layered and underpinned by a sense of loneliness, this psychological mystery leaves a few threads dangling, all of them leading back to an old woman living in London in 1933 with a mysterious servant/companion called Sarah Whittle, of whom she is afraid. This parallel drama draws the book to its nightmarish end.
- INDEPENDENT
