The Binding Chair - Softcover

Harrison, Kathryn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841152692 ISBN 13: 9781841152691

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2005

Synopsis

'This is a tale as absorbing and exciting as Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha.' Sunday Express The magical tale of a young orphan's adventures after she flees rural China for turn-of-the-century Shanghai. From Kathryn Harrison, author of the bestselling memoir THE KISS.

Beautiful, charismatic and destructive, May escapes an arranged marriage in rural China for life in a Shanghai brothel, where, in 1899, she meets Arthur, an Australian. As a member of the Foot Emancipation Society, Arthur calls on May not for his pleasure but for her rehabilitation, only to find himself helplessly seduced by the sight of her bound feet.

Reforming May is out of the question, so Arthur marries her instead, and brings her home to live with his sister Dolly, her husband Dick, and their two girls Alice and Cecily. In Alice May sees the possibility of redemption: a surrogate for the child she has lost. And it is to May that Alice turns for the love her own mother withholds. But when the twelve year old is caught preparing her aunt’s opium pipe, Alice is enrolled in a London boarding school, far from the dangerous influence of the woman who will come to reclaim her, and to control the whole family.

About this title

Review:

The Binding Chair offers up a captivating brew combining the turbulence of turn-of-the-century Shanghai, Russia, London, and 1920s Nice, weaving back and forth in place and time in the lives of a rich cast of characters, all of whom are dominated by the imperious May. As the beautiful and treasured child Chao-tsing, her feet had been bound at five--a brutal fettering of body and heart--and dutifully prepared for marriage by 14. Beaten and humiliated as fourth wife to her silk merchant husband, she escapes by literally piggybacking to Shanghai, renouncing her past. Renaming herself as May, her search for freedom leads her to the dubious door of Madame Grace's where May's only proviso is "Chinese I won't touch".

In the years that follow she swiftly acquires English and French, great swathes of Flaubert's Madame Bovary and William Defoe, a habit for opium, and the devoted Arthur, foot fetishist to the last. As Mrs Arthur Cohen, May enters an extended Jewish household where she sees that its losses--of children, including May and Arthur's own Rose; of the devotion of her unruly niece, Alice; and ultimately of even their home--are heavier than its fabulous gains, built on wartime futures' markets.

In her chosen escape to Nice after the terrible influenza of 1919, taking what is left of her Cohen family, May comes to know that it is still "her feet that held her between one world and the next: balanced between East and West, China and Europe, misery, happiness".

Kathryn Harrison engagingly displays a wealth of research, binding the intricacies of Chinese and Caucasian customs and manners, the realities and myths of historical background, with the daily turmoil of all her characters. If occasionally the rush of events subsumes emotional content, there is still terrific pleasure in the felicitous writing and inventiveness of plot. --Ruth Petrie

Review:

‘A spellbinding novel, ruthless, moving and utterly without sentiment.' Mail on Sunday

'The Binding Chair is a disturbing, beautifully plotted novel, intricate in its detail and panoramic in its sweep. It presents us with a world in which tragedy is natural and everyday, where beauty is a reminder of cruelty.' Daily Telegraph

'Harrison's mesmeric voice compels the reader towards the inevitable climax. The Binding Chair is a beautiful account of the lives of two very different women and the difficulties they face in their quest for independence.' Observer

'A vivid family saga. The characters come alive on the page. Harrison has convincingly captured the Shanghai of the early twentieth-century, a jarring, cacophonous, swarming city of possibility.' Evening Standard

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1841152692
• ISBN 13: 9781841152691
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 338