Ned is a young painter, scraping a living out of his art but yet to really make his name. 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. 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. Harriet is a wonderful narrator, unreliable in the extreme, not terribly likeable, but compellingly ambiguous. There! That’s my complaint over, so now on to the good points, of which there are many.
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.
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. Instead, it crawls along at a toe-curlingly slow pace, with every moment of every day described in excessive detail. If this book had been half its length it would have been wonderful. 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.
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.
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