Outstanding.

I was uncertain about this audio book at first but it turned out to be an enthralling listen and superbly read by Anna Bentinck who dealt flawlessly with character changes so that this had none of the "flatness" that some audio books can have. I keep having to go back to the Ipod to "check" my understanding of what really happened or what I might have misconstrued. Set in Victorian Glasgow and switching to thirties London, the main character tells the story of the artist she befriended and their tragic tale.

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Brilliant narration of a gripping story

I loved this. The story is told with the assurance of an accomplished writer throwing insight into nineteenth century Glasgow and Scots legal proceedings. The narration is astoundingly good with an array of credible voices and accents. I can’t wait for my next Jane Harris novel and will happily listen to anystory narrated by Anna Bentinck from now on. Ten out of ten all round.

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A shocking twist of a story!

If you could sum up Gillespie and I in three words, what would they be?

Delightful, shocking, heartbreaking.

What other book might you compare Gillespie and I to, and why?

This book to me is absolutely unique. If there is another book like this I would very much like to listen to it.

Which scene did you most enjoy?

I loved the scene where Hester and the family all met up in the park to go to the great exhibition. It was like an historic painting of ordinary and exotic peoples lives at that time.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

I found it very difficult to stop listening to this story and felt totally bereft when it was finished.

Any additional comments?

I had read the book a couple of years ago but was so blown away with the shocking twist of it that I wanted to hear the story again. The narrator was superb especially with her portrayal of Sybil. I enjoy reading books set in this period and found it very believable.

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Highly Recommended

I loved this unusual book, told from the point of view of an unreliable narrator in dual time zones. We start the novel in 1933 with Harriet Baxter, an old lady writing her memoirs, looking back on her youth and her intense friendship and involvement with the Gillespie family beginning in 1888.
Simultaneously a second story unfolds in the later time period as Harriet becomes increasingly suspicious of her maid, and we become increasingly unsure of Harriet's sanity and reliability as a narrator.
It's beautifully read by Anna Bentinck who does a nice line in Scottish accidents. (Although the, thankfully little needed, German accent did veer into Pakistani!) she completely strangled the vowels for Elspeth, Sybil lisped beautifully, Ned is quiet, unshowy but appealing, Annie is tired, exasperated and ultimately heartbreaking and so on. Bentinck really made the book come to life. I think she did a much better job than my inner voice would have done.
After a slow start this picked up pace and became very gripping. I was waiting for a big reveal and the loose ends to be tied up nicely at the end, it did seem to peter out a bit for my liking, but I'm still mulling it over so maybe it's better for the reader to be left to draw their own conclusions.

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Narration spoiled it

I read this book a few years ago and enjoyed it, and ended up downloading it recently when I couldn't decide what else to try. The audio vastly less enjoyable. Anna Bentinck's narration does not do it for me. In narrative, I find her tone rather simpering. But the worst aspect (features in the other two audios I've heard narrated by her) is her delusion that she's great at "voice". Her insistence on putting on accents and adopting voices for relaying dialogue is at best distracting and at worst toe-curling. The voice of Scots children was awful. I turned off midway through. That aside, I'm not sure the story itself stood up to a second "reading" and I found all sorts of improbabilities and broad brush plot devices if not really picked up first time round.

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Very Entertaining

This was a long listen which I really enjoyed. The narrator was excellent. It was quite a slow start but I got into its pace and found it quite relaxing; then it went in a direction I was not expecting. A good story overall and a bit unsettling at times.

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lacks pace and plausibility

An over-rated book, I think. To start with, it is too long to sustain a pretty thin plot, and lacks both pace and narrative drive. The plot's plausibility gets preposterous towards the end, and the characters are not that convincing. The only thing that kept me going to the end was the outstanding narration. Anna Bentinck could recite a telephone directory and bring it to life. She certainly earned her money on this book.

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8 people found this helpful

sinister story

What made the experience of listening to Gillespie and I the most enjoyable?

The development of the story-line grabbed me and refused to let go until the bitter end.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Gillespie and I?

About a third the way through I realised this was no ordinary story.

What about Anna Bentinck’s performance did you like?

I thought Anna Bentinck's performance was perfect, not overstated or pushy she created the right atmosphere and gave nothing away.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Not at first, but as the story developed I was itching to get back to it.

Any additional comments?

Stick with it if you think the beginning is a bit too much like a parlour drama - its worth it in the end.

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3 people found this helpful

Enthralling

Brilliant, chilling, clever, creepy, unexpected. Will stay with me for a long time. Highly recommended.

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A masterclass in ambiguity…

Elderly Harriet Baxter sits in her London home, thinking back to when she was a young woman, visiting Glasgow for the International Exhibition of 1888. There, she fell in with the Gillespie family, and became involved in an incident that was to impact both her and them for the rest of their lives. She slowly tells the reader the tale…

Slowly being the operative word. If this book had been half its length it would have been wonderful. Instead, it crawls along at a toe-curlingly slow pace, with every moment of every day described in excessive detail. I was listening to the audiobook, which had the unfortunate effect that I couldn’t skim read as I think I tend to do when reading over-detailed print books. With audio, each word is given equal weight and this, for me, really highlights when an author has fallen self-indulgently in love with her own creation and has forgotten that the poor reader might prefer the story to move along at a speed slightly above the glacial. There! That’s my complaint over, so now on to the good points, of which there are many.

Harriet is a wonderful narrator, unreliable in the extreme, not terribly likeable, but compellingly ambiguous. Although it takes a long time to get there, we learn from foreshadowing that at some point there will be a trial in the story, although we don’t know who will be tried or for what, or whether whoever it is will be found guilty. But we do know that the outcome of the trial left Harriet notorious, and that she is now telling her version of events as a counter to a book which has come out making her out to be some kind of villainous monster.

Ned is a young painter, scraping a living out of his art but yet to really make his name. Harris has set her book at the time of the “Glasgow School” – a period when Glasgow was for a few decades a major artistic hub in the fields of painting and architecture particularly. Ned and his fellow artists are not in the first rank of this movement – rather they are shown as a kind of wider, secondary grouping inspired by the artistic buzz around the city. Harris doesn’t go into the art of the period in any detail, but uses it to provide a very authentic background to her group of artists and hangers-on, and Ned’s work is clearly influenced by the realism that was a feature of the real painters of the movement.

Harriet, although she would never admit it, is clearly obsessed by Ned, and jealous of Annie and their children for taking up so much of his time and attention. Harriet would claim that it’s Ned’s work that interests her – her belief that he has the talent to become one of the major artists of his day, with a little help from an altruistic friend. The reader suspects her feelings towards him might be little less lofty – a little more earthy, in fact. She soon becomes an intimate friend of the family, though one suspects that the family may be less thrilled by this than Harriet is.

Harriet’s voice is excellent, and Anna Bentinck’s first-rate performance does the character full justice (along with all the other characters, to whom she gives a myriad of authentic-sounding Scottish accents). As a single lady past the first flush of youth in the Victorian era, Harriet is of course outwardly prim and proper, but her inward thoughts allow us to know her mind is not quite as pure as a young lady’s should be! She is often very funny, usually unintentionally, and Harris is fabulous at letting the reader read between the lines of the picture of innocent kindliness Harriet is trying to paint of herself. The other characters are all presented through Harriet’s biased eyes, so that we can’t be sure if poor Annie is as ineffective a mother as we see, or if Sybil, the eldest child, is really as monstrously badly behaved as she seems. We can’t even be sure if Ned has any real talent. What we do know for certain is that Harriet is lonely and alone, and desperately seeking some kind of human relationship that will allow her to feel she has a place in the world. This means that even when she’s at her most manipulative, we can’t help having some level of sympathy for her circumstances. It’s all a masterclass in ambiguity, and even by the end I couldn’t decide if I loved Harriet or hated her, wanted to give her a comforting hug or throw stones at her. I’m very, very glad she’s not my (mythical) husband’s friend though…

When the story proper finally begins, well into the book, it becomes quite dark. Up to that point, Harriet has been at worst a little pitiable – a woman repressed by her society who is desperately seeking some way to validate her existence, even if only to herself. From there on (and I’m deliberately being vague to avoid spoilers) the reader has to decide if she is a monster or a victim. The beauty of the way Harris plays it is that it’s quite possible to believe she is both. Older Harriet, whose story we learn in short segments throughout the book, is a rather heart-breaking picture of the loneliness of a spinster, somewhat shunned by the world partly because of her notoriety but also simply because of her age.

So a wonderful portrait of an ambiguous character set against an authentic background of the Glasgow art movement – had it not been for the truly excessive, even though well written, padding, this would undoubtedly have been a five star read. As it is, four stars, and a plea for editors to take a stronger line with authors who fall too much in love with their own wordsmithery.

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1 person found this helpful