Of Detail and Delusion 
 Jane Harris' narrator, Harriet Baxter, is an old woman writing in 1933 about events that took place in Glasgow in 1888, when in her mid-thirties she became friends with the rising painter Ned Gillespie and his family. Harris has the voice down perfectly, the expansive late Victorian style that reports every detail and (apparently) every nuance of feeling. She is an attractive protagonist, with a nice touch of humor and less maiden modesty than one might imagine. But she does go on, at Jamesian length and more; my only problem with this novel is that, at 504 pages, it is about 150 pages too long. 
 It was especially interesting to me for personal reasons, for when Harriet moves to Glasgow to attend the International Exhibition, she finds rooms in a part of the city where I myself lived as a young man; her depth of factual detail is extraordinary, even down to the addition of genuine period street maps. She also uses words that I have not heard in years, such as "outwith" (for "outside of") and those wonderful archaic terms of the Scottish legal system. For, as Harriet makes clear early on, her originally charming story will eventually turn tragic and climax in a criminal trial sensational enough to feature in books published many decades later. We will learn more about both these things in time, but for now we have to wait for them. 
 Harriet had met Ned Gillespie briefly in an exhibition in London. Four months later, by sheer chance, she rescues a lady from choking in a Glasgow street who turns out to be the artist's mother. She is invited round to tea, and soon comes to see more of the family: Ned, his wife Annie (also an artist), his two young daughters, his sister and brother, and of course the mother, Elspeth, a determinedly "raffeened" woman with an active involvement in Christian charity. Harriet herself is helpful, generous, and moderately well-off, so she soon becomes a godsend to this family whose lives are more of a struggle. Before long, one wonders if she is not becoming too ubiquitous as a friend, like a guest who will not depart, though the Gillespies always treat her with respect. 
 But how should WE treat Harriet? Her brief accounts of incidents in her life in 1933, while she is writing this memoir, and especially her troubles with her live-in housekeeper-companion, suggest that she may be emotionally self-deluding. As events unfold up there in Scotland, we will find ourselves in the extraordinary position of not knowing quite what to believe; she is true in detail, but perhaps less so in matters of feeling. The climactic trial scenes, where various versions of truth will contend with one another, are superb. Perhaps they are only possible because of the leisurely way Harriet had drawn us (again apparently) into her mind earlier. As the book has grown in my mind over the past two weeks, I see the author has planted all sorts of seeds that may or may not germinate later--a fascinating technique that perhaps justifies the book's length after all.