REVIEW: THE BINDING (Bridget Collins)

I'm not mad, I'm disappointed.

(This review contains spoilers, so... you know.)

Reading this book was like falling in love with the perfect man only to find out that he sleeps with socks on. It was like Starbucks getting your order wrong but you're too embarrassed to say anything about it so you just sip reluctantly until it's lukewarm and then throw $7 down the drain. It was like finding a cute jacket at Forever 21 that says "I love tacos" on the back.

This book made my two inner wolves (hype and disappointment) fight each other, and I don't know who's winning. Certainly not me.

Let me tell you what The Binding promised us, and then let me tell you what we got.

The Binding by Bridget Collins follows Emmett Farmer, a young man with a mystery illness struggling to help his family run their farm in the countryside. After a letter arrives asking for him, Emmett is whisked away to a cottage in the woods to become a Binder's apprentice — an occupation feared and misunderstood. There, Emmett will learn how to bind your worst memories into a book: your traumas, your tears, your misdeeds. You'll be rid of them, finally free to live your life. That is, until one day, when a mysterious young man named Lucian Darnay comes in for a binding. Emmett doesn't recognize him, but there is an unmistakable sense of knowing between the two boys, answered for only when Emmett finds his own book.

Sounds good, right? I'd swipe right. In fact, I did.

And then I was catfished.

The Binding is a story told in three acts. Let's go through them together:

1. The Act Where Binding is Relevant and Interesting

In the first part of the book, Emmett is brought to the bindery to learn under the tutelage of Seredith, an old woman who seems to know more about Emmett than he knows about himself. She teaches him some basics, helps him through his bouts of illness, otherwise known as "binder's fever." I loved Seredith. I loved her as a character and as an expression of what I assumed the book's theme would be: namely that our innermost traumas should be honoured and soothed, even if they never see the light of day, and that compassion is essential in healing.

(Spoiler alert: This was not the theme. This book does not have a theme.) (Spoiler alert 2, electric boogaloo: SHE F*CKING DIES. LIKE IMMEDIATELY.)

If you're thinking, "huh, that's quick — for a significant sage-character to die a quarter of the way through the novel," you would be right. In fact, everything is far too fast in this part, and yet simultaneously draaaaags onnnnnn. Worse yet is that, with Seredith, dies the whole theme of the novel and any importance binding whatsoever. I bet you thought binder's fever was cool, huh? A thematic exploration of suppressing trauma, maybe? After all, it certainly reads like it:

"Before this, I'd never been ill in my life. I never knew that my body could betray me, that my mind could go out like a lamp and leave nothing but darkness. I couldn't remember getting sick; if I tried, all I saw was a mess of nightmare-scorched fragments. Even my memories of my life before that — last spring, last winter — were tinged with the same gangrenous shadow, as if nothing was healthy any more."

Too bad it stops being relevant and is never explored again in any significant way. This act set up some super interesting themes and reveals, and then drops them like I drop my paycheck two days into the week.

2. Extended Flashback That I Thought I Would Hate but Didn't

I'm assuming if you've read this far that you don't care about spoilers. So I'm just gonna tell you that Emmett remembers everything. And it's through a very, very long flashback scene in the middle of the book. Which is a recipe for disaster. So why didn't I hate it?

Because it knew what it was. This section seemed to somehow successfully slow-burn without dragging. I genuinely cared about what was happening (low bar, I know), even though there was nary a mention of binding in sight. Somehow, it was my favourite part of the book: the pacing was fine, the character development was great, and the narrative voice was immersive and true to period. The romance between Emmett and Lucian was engaging and heartfelt.

Anyway, enough of what I liked, because that ended, and then I was left with... well...

3. What the F*ck Was That?

Come one, come all, to the part of the book that ruined the rest of it for me!

Here we enter Lucian's PoV. For some reason, it's written in present-tense. Who knows why. I don't care. But this part is bad. We lose Emmett's story and progress, we lose any sense of binding that isn't Big Evil™, and I lose patience. The book takes a huge tonal shift that doesn't get resolved, and though who can say if Lucian is consistent as a character (I can: he's not), Emmett certainly isn't. He becomes a bizarre and whiny vagrant who basically accosts Lucian at any given moment (who, due to his binding, has no idea who Emmett is). I truly could not care less about Lucian's perspective, though that's generally the case with the upper class anyway (#eattherich).

The book loses momentum completely and I truly cannot figure out what point this act is to serve except maybe to expand on its world and the consumption of others' trauma by the rich. Okay, I can dig that — except why are we bringing that up now, especially when our point of comparison, Seredith, is dead by this time? And especially when our perspective of binding is gone? And especially when Emmett is at his absolute least interesting and couldn't care less about the namesake craft if you paid him in summer evenings spent with his hands gliding across Lucian's sweaty back.

This book has an utterly disappointing ending that makes it seem like whole chapters are missing, and not in that I want more kind of way. Entire character and thematic arcs get cut brutally off and are replaced with an entirely different form of narration that ultimately seems disconnected from the whole.

So — with all that said:

FINAL THOUGHTS

I wanted to give this book 2 stars to help it inch away from its bizarrely high rating because I'm petty af, but after all the other objectively awful books I read this year, it felt wrong sorting The Binding into quite the same league. I can see what this book tried to be, somewhere underneath its patchwork structure, and so I'm skewing my rating to a 3 because of its two decent first parts. Unfortunately, this book suffers a severe lack of vision that causes a huge foundational issue: what is The Binding trying to say? It's fodder for the analyst to read a book about books, especially when so many interesting and important questions are raised: How might fiction serve to talk about our innermost truths? If we could throw away our trauma, would it let us lead better lives, or would some part of us always be missing? In a world where telling your story means losing it forever, what does it mean to buy or sell a book?

I would have liked answers, or at least theories. Instead, I got a story that forgot what it was halfway through. I guess that's apt for a book about forgetting.

(Originally posted on Goodreads: March 10, 2019)