Customer Reviews

Mummy's Legs

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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.