I read this brilliant story at the very start of my writing journey and have studied and dissected it ever since, trying to work out its magic, so I might struggle to keep this brief, but as it’s taught me so very much about creating resonance and tension in my own writing I might have to bang on a wee bit. ‘The Art of Foot-binding’ tells the tale of Janice as she tries to hold onto a fractured marriage by tacitly accepting her husband’s infidelity, hoping that what remains unspoken will eventually blow over. 

Her fourteen-year-old daughter intuits part of this and becomes increasingly contemptuous of her mother. The narrative is told in two voices. The primary voice tells Janice’s story in the present tense, from a third-person limited point-of-view, showing the reader everything Janice sees as if it were a camera sitting on her shoulder; but it also has access to what she’s thinking, knows what happened to her yesterday and is able to make insightful expositional reflections about her life. 

This voice is contemporary, clear and to-the-point, but it is the secondary voice that readers first encounter, a voice that reads like an extract from an ancient Chinese instruction manual teaching the practise of foot-binding. This voice frames the story as well as running between scenes described by the primary voice, and is always presented in italics, implying that it is a quotation. It opens with: 

“Begin on the feast day of the goddess Guanyin, that she may grant mercy. Or on the cusp of winter when the cold will numb bones splintered like ice on a broken lake. Begin when she is young, when the bones are closer to water, and a foot may be altered like the course of a mountain stream.”

The culturally alien similes and metaphors (to contemporary western ears) create a mystical tone that implies the torture it heralds is something artistic and spiritual. Straightaway, the reader feels a dissonance between the lyrical beauty and horrific subject matter, and starts asking questions: what is the significance of this distinct voice that assumes an allusive compliance with the reader? Is this a quote from a real text? Who is the assumed addressee? That this addressee was more appalled than in agreement with the voice’s culturally embedded assumptions, created a strong narrative jar that coloured everything that follows, imbuing the story with a sense of unsettling dread. 

The two narrative voices do not speak to one another explicitly, so when the primary narrative voice places the reader into a starkly juxtaposed dramatic present, it does so without explanation, leaving the reader to make their own connections, to start actively wondering what the interplay between these voices might mean, and what might link the modern-day protagonist to the horrors described by the lyrically exquisite secondary voice. The narrative atmosphere this creates prickles with darkly foreshadowed unknowns that resonate through the story, creating a mesmerising tension. Seriously if you haven’t read this story, do.

First published in Dinosaurs on Other Planets, The Stinging Fly, 2015; you can listen to a radio version of the story on RTE here