This is a portrayal of the topsy-turvy adult world as seen through the eyes of Sarah, an only child who lives in London with her mother, a successful writer. A new landscape opens when her mother attempts suicide and Sarah is sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Yorkshire.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The title of British poet Bingham's spare, quietly affecting debut novel quotes the nurse at the London hospital where the 10-year-old protagonist's mother is taken following a suicide attempt. "We need you to be Mummy's legs," the nurse tells young Sarah, who serves throughout the novel as her emotionally unstable mother's gofer, confessor and apologist. While the self-indulgent, manipulative Catherine, a journalist with a circle of literary friends and a poet for a lover, is recovering from her breakdown, Sarah is deposited by her mild-mannered father, Harry--estranged from his wife--at the country home of childless Aunt Marion. The novel alternately cuts from this trying period to a decade in the future, when Sarah, now a young woman in her first love relationship, is helping her embittered, still-single mother celebrate her 50th birthday. By continually switching tenses (from past to present) and voices (from third person to first), Bingham creates a dizzying perspective that mirrors Sarah's enforced selflessness. These same obtrusive narrative techniques, however, deny the novel its driving force, disorienting the reader. Bingham, winner of the 1996 Eric Gregory Poetry Award (for Cohabitation) is at her best in her pared-down descriptions of the country--"The sea was calm and so far away you couldn't even hear what it said."--but the characterizations of all but Sarah's mother seem piecemeal and incomplete. Atmospheric but too loosely pieced together, the novel never quite reaches critical mass; nevertheless, it stylishly sketches a series of emotional states.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
At the center of this poignant story of a mother-daughter relationship is an attempted suicide. When Catherine's no-love-lost marriage dissolves and her longtime lover dumps her, she overdoses and gets hauled to the hospital, from which she leaves and disappears for weeks. This and other family dramas force Catherine's ten-year-old daughter, Sarah, to grow up fast. Luckily, her father and her mother's cousin, Marion, warm her with love, and as an adult Sarah is able to celebrate her mummy's 50th birthday and start a relationship of her own. In short, gem-like chapters, poet Bingham turns chronology on its head, moving back and forth from Sarah's adulthood to her youth, as well as to her mother's childhood. The result is a resonant mosaic and a notable literary debut. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
-Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
-Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A View of "Mummy's Legs",
By
This review is from: Mummy's Legs: A Novel (Hardcover)
Kate Bingham has used her poets eye to craft a novel that is very good indeed in its parts but fails to cohere as a whole. In a series of episodes that flash forwards and backwards in time, we watch the child Sarah cope with a selfish, lover-obsessed mother, a work-obsessed father, and an aunt grieving for a lost child. Sarah copes, gets through it all, by practicing the "magnificent numbness I seem always to have felt." Hardly surprising, since none of the adults in her life appear to give a toss about her. About halfway through, we finally learn what the title means. (American readers, it should be remembered, do not think "mother" when they see "mummy", we think Egyptian burial practices. This is another bit of a problem.) When Sarah's mother tried to kill herself, Sarah is called to the telephone to speak to a social worker who tells her that "we need you to be Mummy's legs and go and open the front door and let the ambulence men in." That's it. It doesn't come up again. It is this readers opinion that novels need characters that develop past the names their authors give them, story lines/plots that keep the reader involved--and guessing!--and conclusions that satisfactorily close the circle. Mummys Leg is stylistically a delight, and powerfully invokes the readers sensory powers--but really it's not a novel: it's a long short story.
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