The Binding Chair: Or, a Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society [Paperback]

The story is sad, erotic and macabre. There is cruelty and passion, and a cast of fully developed characters who each have some sort of mental or physical disfigurement. Everyone suffers in this book and it's hard to read, but also hard to put down.

One weak point is the many the dream sequences which tend to stop the narrative. Another is the rather unsettling way it jumps back and forth in time. Also, the author has chosen to make the family Jewish, but yet the only thing Jewish about them seem to be their name.

Ms. Harrison is a writer with a fine talent and who is not afraid to probe deeply into the hidden abscesses of human behavior by using startling details to depict her twisted characters. It comes across as both disturbing and enlightening. I applaud her willingness to deal with the forbidden.

I recently enjoyed her 1995 novel, Poison, which was better paced and richer in texture. The Binding Chair, however, was perhaps written too quickly. This happens sometimes with popular writers who are on a deadline. Therefore, although I enjoyed reading it, I cannot give it an across-the-board recommendation although I do intend to read whatever she writes next.

I have championed this author even when critics sprang up everywhere to defame her for her memoir of incest, The Kiss (which I actually found to be eloquent and restrained, especially as compared to others in the genre). I purchased The Binding Chair the moment it appeared in stores, and devoured the first several chapters enraptured. It was thus, with the greatest frustration and disappointment--indeed, embarrassment, as I had already recommended the book enthusiastically to several friends(including one declared Harrison foe)--that I watched the novel spiral into a deformed mess of sordid, irrelevant detail and vague side stories. I found most that most of the characters lacked both credibility and appeal, and their relationships were, for the most part, founded upon obtuse and inexplicable attachments. The narrative structure became less and less compelling, lurching back and forth in time and place as it labored toward a contrived and unoriginal ending...such a waste of what must have been a considerable research effort on Harrison's part...and truly disturbing to see this normally disciplined author wielding ill-defined excesses of anger and depravity in this fashion.

May-li is a Chinese woman with bound feet who has married into a British Jewish family living in Shanghai. Her story leads "The Binding Chair," and the others swirl around it in vivid detail. There's her sweet Australian husband with his love of social do-gooding, a lisping genius of a governess, May's niece, who takes her aunt's encouragement too much to heart, and a heartbroken Russian on the Siberian Express. I didn't care for the ending, but understand it. I would much rather have had the book go on.