[In the following review, Scurr offers a negative assessment of The Binding Chair and suggests that The Kiss was an unfortunate turning point for the worse in Harrison’s career.]

Kathryn Harrison had published three novels before The Kiss (1997), a memoir about her incestuous affair with her father, brought her notoriety. She was admired for breaking “the last taboo.” But she was also suspected of attempting to catapult a decent but unremarkable novelistic career into a more glamorous stratosphere. Grounds for this suspicion could have been located in the fact that Harrison's first novel, Thicker Than Water (1991), had a plot strikingly similar to her later memoir. The uncharitable interpretation of The Kiss is much more interesting retrospectively than it was in 1997, when it seemed mean-minded and cynical. Harrison's new novel, The Binding Chair, recounts the life of a victim of Chinese foot-binding, a Shanghai prostitute who marries an Australian client in 1899 and ends up on the French Riviera in time for the Jazz Age. It compares unfavourably with Harrison's earlier historically inspired novel Poison (1995, published in the UK as A Thousand Orange Trees,) and suggests not only that she is an irritatingly sensationalist writer, but that The Kiss may also have damaged her perception of herself as a novelist.

Poison was set at the time of the Spanish Inquisition, and the Marquis de Sade was coyly included in Harrison's acknowledgements. It lacked the literary grace of Jenny Diski's Nothing Natural, but the torture and transgressive sex were at least woven into an interesting story. In contrast, they protrude obscenely from The Binding Chair, where the narrative is more eccentric than the kind that commonly links the scenes in a pornographic video or novel, but no less insubstantial. One explanation for this arises from the frequency with which sex and sexual imagery appear in the novel. In Chapter Three, for example, five-year-old May appeals to her father to release her from the binding chair. He refuses and reflects that “after all, he himself enjoyed marriage to a nimble and delicate woman—a woman whose whole foot he could take into his rectum, even as her left hand cupped his testicles, her right squeezed the shaft of his penis, and her mouth wet his glans. There was a price for luxury. …” I find it hard to believe that this account details a historical motivation for foot-binding, and harder still to imagine how evidence for it could be collated. At the end of Poison, Harrison very carefully explained which parts of her novel were directly borrowed from history and which had been imaginatively elaborated. The Binding Chair includes no such explanations and the presence of two further scenes centred on anal sex tips the balance towards imaginative licence.

But imaginative licence counts for little in this novel. Harrison is audibly impatient with her own story, always hurrying on to the next sensational scene and brusquely dismissing the finer details. May runs away from an abusive marriage, carried on the back of a servant to whom she promises her jewelry. This has the compelling, if limited, logic of a fairy story. However, it closely follows a scene in which an older May and her niece witness a young girl being slowly and publicly cut in half as a punishment for running away from marriage and bringing disgrace to her family. Why wasn't May pursued and punished? Harrison dismisses these questions: “Probably [her husband] was grateful for the peace that returned once May had gone.” She is more interested in describing how May, despite running for her life, took the time to stop at her parental home and urinate over her grandmother's tiny silk shoes.

Still more ludicrous is the scene in which May's future husband starts to unbind her feet expecting to find a perfect miniature foot inside the wrappings, instead of the broken, rotting (allegedly erotic) reality. In some characters this ignorance could be credible. Arthur Cohen, however, is a member of the Foot Emancipation Society. Harrison quickly explains the surprising lacuna in his knowledge: he missed the society's indoctrination meeting and the lecture from the surgeon who explained the crippling fractures of the binding process. He missed both events, did not bother to question his fellow missionaries and still made it to Shanghai? The tendency to slovenliness culminates in a ridiculous scene in Fortnum and Mason's where May, carried in a makeshift sedan chair, improbably deputed by her family to visit her nieces who were only sent to boarding school in the first place because of her own corrupting influence, inadvertently causes a riot, rather in the mode of Paddington Goes to the Sales. Bad novels are rarely interesting. But the trajectory of Harrison's literary career is. Her promising start was overshadowed by a harrowing memoir in which she displayed her own sexual disturbance. Now she writes as though her public wanted and expected nothing but sex from her. It's not true.