The Binding by Bridget Collins: Review & Writing Craft Notes
Real talk about Real books written BY Real people FOR Real people
What a read this was! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The author Bridget Collins is from Kent, England and studied Theatre in London, and the book’s dialogue has all the classic English sarcasm and subtle meanings I’d thus expect and adore.
I found that I have so much to say about this book and all it means, especially in light of today’s AI-book-creation debates, so I’ve broken this post up into sections. (I’m going to try and add jump links in the table of contents, and this is my first attempt with this feature, so bear with me.)
Table of contents
Authenticity
The timing of reading this book is incredible with all of the hype going on about people using AI tools like ChatGPT to write books because Bridget Collins actually discusses what makes a “real” book, in her own way. But before I get to all that, let’s just recap the current state of events:
Basically, a bunch of people want you to think that the worst thing that could happen to the publishing industry has finally happened:
Even a parrot can now “write” a “novel.” I wish I was joking, but honestly, a trained parrot can speak a few words to dictate a story prompt like “Tell me a story 90,000 words long about Martha Stewart going to the moon” into an AI text-creation tool. Within some minutes depending on the server speed, you’ll get a bunch of text long enough to technically be considered “a novel draft.”
Will the “novel” be any good? I suppose that depends on what your criteria of “good” is, but in my humble opinion:
Fuck no.
Now if technology allowed the parrot to consciously put its thoughts into text, THAT’s the novel I would buy. That would be original and interesting.
I’ve seen what these AI text generators do, and the only impressive thing about them to me is their processing speed. What the AI tool provides is a massive copy-paste job of text stolen from all over the internet and thrown in a blender with pattern recognition tools to give you, essentially, the most common tropes online based on what you entered for a prompt, rendering your creation un-original, which is effectively the death of your “new” story appeal.
Congratulations AI tools, for not only do we still have to wade through the blatant plagiarism novels rewritten and self-published by real people everyday on Amazon, but now you’ve allowed all the shortcut seekers to produce thousands of randomized copies of unoriginal shit, and all in LESS TIME. Well done, you. Way to make the world a “better place.” What a wonderful use of technology.
What amazes me more is how anyone thinks that using AI text generation to write a book is a good idea. Of course, that’s easy to say until it’s YOUR book ideas and text that’s stolen. That’s why we now have Getty Images suing Midjourney AI image generation software for copyright theft after they stole all sorts of images, including those of real people, to make their “creations.”
Who actually thinks that what the world really needs right now is MORE copied crap books about “the human experience” created by algorithms that WILL NEVER KNOW what the “human experience” is actually like?
In this fantasy book “The Binding,” they talk about the difference between a real book, which in this world, refers to someone’s actual memories removed from their minds completely and stored inside the pages of these enchanted books. As a reader, you actually experience the erased memories when you read such an enchanted book. This is a stark contrast to what they call ripoff novels, or the simple lies invented by people or copied from other memories of other people that don’t “pull you in the way a real book does.”
It’s a profound statement to make about books in general, even in parallel to the real world because the best books we read do feel entirely original when we read them. They give us a true experience. When something is made with craftsmanship, and with such a sacrifice of putting part of your soul into the pages, then certainly it ought to be worth more than something made by an algorithm that is scraping up random words, throwing them together, and spitting them back out at you again, as an odd mesh between an imitation generator and a randomizer all in one. There’s no soul in that kind of creation, and I like the way that the author gives a nod to books being a precious thing. Especially in times long ago, books were known only as physical creations, collectible items, and valuable because they were rare, not because they were mass-produced. I think that’s something that the modern age has forgotten about books that’s really worth remembering, especially in these times we are going through now.
Use AI where it is needed. Maybe think of AI in terms of improving editing tools. Use AI for pattern-recognition that can save lives, predict natural disasters, help doctors and overwhelmed nurses, create more environmentally friendly and restorative technology, but keep AI out of the artists’ workshop.
The resulting flood of AI-generated stories (all stolen ideas and snippets from other published works it has scraped up from online sources) can only destroy the publishing industry it seeks to profit from. Flooding a market with something that’s easily mass-produced is literally what kills its value.
By the way, there are tools that can help verify a handcrafted vs. AI-created story. In Scrivener, in the Projects menu > Writing History, it shows you everything it’s tracked about how many words you’ve written each day, your average word counts, how many days you’ve written in this project, and it even records the day you started the project. All of this data is automatically created and tracked in the Scrivener program and exportable to show your full writing history. Publishers should take note and request writing history data like this to help them weed out AI-created stories much faster.
Booktemplation
Alright, let’s dive more into the actual reading experience.
To me, the biggest story point was: Should we keep memories that hurt us? Is it better to erase them?
It’s important question even in today’s world because I can’t help thinking about the way everything online can be “forgotten,” edited or deleted at any time by anyone with the means. What you read today is never guaranteed to be there in the same way tomorrow. History pages and news reports are rewritten and edited so many times online to hide ugly truths. But…if it’s printed in a book, it cannot be erased remotely. In these books, in libraries, the true records remain in their original form, so libraries can only become more important in future.
In the world of “The Binding,” it’s an old England where people still pay in guineas, arranged marriages are expected, carriages are still the main mode of transportation, and women have no rights. The only magical element presented that makes it a fantasy is that binders are wizard-like people with the gift of wiping away people’s memories and trapping them inside a physical book. The world is overall very dreary in Act 1, but we learn that there is a big reason for this:
Some of Emmett’s happiest memories have been erased, and he doesn’t find out until the start of Act 2.
***From here on down will be spoilers.*******************************************************
On the surface, the story first struck me as a fantasy written in a mystery format.
However…
it’s actually a wonderfully delightful m/m gay romance, wrapped up in a mystery fantasy package. I’m actually amazed no one told me it was a gay romance, because that made me love it so much more when I found out at the reveal just past the midpoint of the book. There are a lot of clues leading up to that, and I started to suspect this was headed towards gay romance right about… Well, let’s put it this way:
When the guy who’s supposed to be courting your sister is so happy to have you around chaperoning the two of them together instead of trying to send you away…
And they’re all these awkward pauses with the two boys alone, looking at each other…
And Emmett has all this suppressed angst expressed through awkward hatred, (ah, the good old hate-how-much-I-want-them vibe) then I just knew feelings lurked below the surface.
My favorite moment was when we had the awkward “teach him how to dance” moment of his sister Alta pushing the boys into waltzing together so that Emmett could practice helping Alta learn to dance when Lucian was away 🥰A moment so beautifully illustrated by this fan art on Tumblr’s Queer book corner.
Also, consider the name of the love interest: Lucian Darnay? Excuse me, but what name does that remind you of? I was hearing “Dorian Gray” in my head almost every time I read his name, which by the way, was the first gay romance I read. That was a lovely Easter egg, but I don’t know if it was intentional or not.
Structurally:
“The Binding” has three acts, so as a writer, you might assume it follows the save the cat beats — except here it’s done very differently. The first and second acts are from Emmett’s point of view, and the third act is from the love interest Lucian’s point of view. On paper, that looks like a structural nightmare, but here it works because of the storyline and what “binding” is.
The first act is all about Emmett, discovering his calling to become a binder, which is more like some thing he got forced into going along with, and he agrees to do it simply because he wants to be cured of his mental illness that leads to blackout rages and visions of things coming and going from his mind so that he has a very precarious grip on reality. He’s told that becoming a binder, embracing his calling, will cure him of this binder’s fever. By the end of act one, we learn that he does have missing memories that have been bound in a book, and he wants to remember them because he’s having nightmares about what he suspects might be his missing memories, so he throws the book of his memories into a fire, which restores his memories back to him after the book burns. That’s when we break into act two, which is a shift into the flashback of his lost memories. The experience of reading Act II is as if we are reading the book of his memories that he has just burned in order to remember them again, and the missing memories are all about his romance with the boy Lucian, who was courting his sister.
You could say that Emmett does make a big change in that he wants to remember and take control of his life. Yet it’s up to his old lover — who has had his mind erased also — to make the final change and decide whether or not he wants to remember what has been erased from their past in order for them to be together.
The final test of the hero Emmett is more of a test of his love interest Lucian than it is of himself because we already know by act three how much Emmett loves him. Emmett was always willing to do anything for him, even when his whole family was against them. That was already established way back in the middle of act two. Here Emmett’s POV in acts one and two is really just all set up to experience his partner Lucian remembering their love for each other.
Did act 3 need to switch into Lucian’s POV though?
You could argue that the “will he or won’t he choose to remember” when Lucian’s supposed to get married to some other girl is heightened by Lucian’s POV. Since Lucian doesn’t remember Emmett, and Lucian thinks getting memories erased makes you weak, then it’s somewhat more suspenseful. Lucian could make either choice.
Then the issue of the servant Nell being raped repeatedly by Lucian’s father becomes a bigger subplot. Lucian’s father has Nell’s memories of the abuse erased repeatedly in order to continue that abuse. Lucian observes all this since he lives in the same large mansion. Nell’s story illustrates that in many ways it’s worse to lose memories because then you suffer the same problems again and again (which kills you inside). Nell’s suicide later seems meant to drive Lucian into arguing with his father about it in protest of how his dad had treated Nell. Then his dad makes the fateful slip and admits the turning point:
Your memories have been erased too.
Thus, Lucian starts pushing for answers.
But did we really need to see Nell’s suicide for that to happen? Couldn’t we have seen the whole story from Emmett’s POV and learned about this suicide indirectly? I wonder why Emmett telling Lucian about Lucian’s lost memories wouldn’t have been enough to make Lucian push for answers…but I suppose it’s a style choice.
Overall, the romance was swoon-worthy, and we do get a happy ending with the boys both remembering each other and reunited.
Trigger warnings:
⚠There’s a suicide that we see the aftermath of but not in live action.
⚠There are multiple references to rape and family incest, but they occur off-screen, and only the impacts of them are really depicted on screen.
⚠The sex scenes are not depicted in graphic detail, but rather in the stream of consciousness, writing to show the feeling about of them, without actually describing any physical movements in the scene so that the act is felt rather than “seen” on the page, which worked well.
⚠There is an on-screen murder of a dog, which I skipped over because I love animals.
⚠There is a villain famous for raping servants in his household over a period of years, and he talks about it, and let’s just say it was so chilling that it makes me believe there must be a really dark, deep corner of hell reserved especially for such people.🔥
Wordsmithing
There’s a technique I saw in this book that I’d never seen before, so I’m calling this “the stitching-needle hook” technique.
The biggest success of this book to me was the way it hooks you with laser focus on the point, which is literally “The Binding.” There are forms of hypnosis where you repeat a word over and over again to grab people, and that actually happens in the text here. Each appearance of the word “Binding” is like another stitch that sews your attention deeper into the story. This word “Binding” is used like a “needle” from the cover itself.
For example:
᯽You pick up the book and see “The Binding” on the cover. Hmm…interesting.
᯽Then look at the way she uses “binding” in the first sentence of the book:
When the letter came I was out in the fields, binding up my last sheaf of wheat with hands that were shaking so much I could hardly tie the knot.
It’s so subtle the way she slips that verb “binding” in there, but it’s very intentional to remind you at least subconsciously of what you need to focus on.
᯽Next Emmett comes home to his parents talking about how he will be sent to the binder. Ah, now we have our needle back in hand again, but the stitch is changing. Immediately we ask more questions that make us want to keep reading. Who is the binder? What does it mean?
The tension of not knowing why books were shameful yet being sent to a book binder who may have cursed him — loving books but fearing them (paralleling his fighting off his mental illness) pulls the stitches of our interest tighter still.
᯽Chapter 2 opens with a description of “The bindery.” With every new usage of the word “binding,” the author is revealing just a little more information without giving it all away too soon. This chapter hooks us completely into the place and unveils the seriousness of this craft.
᯽Chapter 3 introduces The “binders’ fever” concept, and we get a new expansion of the “binding” word as we are “bound” to the story literally through this needle-word. This chapter was important because it shows Emmett that his mental illness is actually a sign that he has a gift to access and remove people’s memories, so it changes the way he looks at himself so that he moves beyond his earlier shame and depression.
᯽Chapter 4 introduces the needle-word in a new way:
“Whatever happened? She was Bound! That’s what happened.”
Emmett faces intruders banging on the door who know that Emmett’s master Seredith took painful memories from a girl who came there earlier. The intruders demand that Emmett give them the girl’s book of memories (because that enchanted memory book is all about what he did to that poor girl, the bastard.) This part is where Emmett gets truly terrified, and though he stands up to the intruders and scares them away, Emmett realizes that maybe some element of binding could be evil.
᯽In the beginning of chapter 5, Seredith finally says:
“It’s only a binding.”
Then at last, with this entirely different attitude of binding as being like giving mercy to suffering people, we get the full explanation of how it works. Emmett comes to terms with the fact that even if he doesn’t feel that binding memories away is always so ethical, he accepts that he is a binder because it is actually relieving his mental illness. We see him getting physically stronger too, and he’s now free from blackouts. In fact the whole book is a progression of Emmett accepting everything about who he is and what his strengths are, which only makes him stronger.
After chapter 6, the “binding” shows up frequently, and I felt completely hooked to it as the conflict heightens with Emmett being pushed toward another master binder and sent into the city…a filthy place full of wealthy men who profit handsomely from the blackmail weapons of enchanted books of memories that people wanted to forget.
All in all, I thought this beginning hook technique was so well done because those first chapters are so often where people are more likely to put a book down, but at some point, the stitches are complete. Once you’re sewn into the story with enough “stitches,” then you have to get to the end.
Thanks for reading, everyone. Stay tuned for my March book battle during the first week of the month. Wait until I show you what I bring home from the library to choose from (it’s so random that I don’t even know what they will be yet) — I’ll need your votes to decide which one to study🤓. Feel free to share this post, & let me know what you thought in the comments.
Thanks for reading!
By the way, I also write a Cozy Sci-Fi Comedy series:
And a column on tips for novelists to help survive revisions and publishing in general:
