2019/37: The Binding -- Bridget Collins

"...you mean novels?" he added, with a flicker of mockery. "They're not real books. They’re written, like magazines. They're not actual people, or actual memories. They’re invented..." [loc. 3793]

Emmett Farmer has worked on his family's farm all his life: this summer, though, he was struck down by a mysterious illness, and now he to weak to manage his share of the harvesting. Fortunately -- fortunately? -- he has been requested as an apprentice by a binder, an old woman who lives out on the road to the marshes, and binds books.

"But you hate books, they're wrong," Emmett objects, remembering how his parents punished him years ago, when he bought a book at a fair (they buried it), and how disgusted they are by even walking past a Licens'd Bookseller.

Emmett, of course, does not have all the facts. He doesn't understand what his apprenticeship is training him to do. Or why he's been chosen as apprentice. Or how he knows the layout of the binder's house, when he enters it for the first time. Or why he fears something terrible in the locked room.

The blurb for this book, and many of the reviews, give away a lot of the plot, but fortunately I read it on Kindle, and so long after I'd acquired it that I had forgotten the details of the central conceit. And there is one important element of the story that isn't revealed on the cover, and which I found very satisfactory.

The setting, strongly evocative of 18th-century England, is fascinating. There are plenty of familiar tropes: the old house on the marshes, the family feud, the arranged marriage, the commercialisation of something magical. And there are hints of a well-constructed history: was the 1750 Act a response to the Crusades?

Spoilers start here, highlight to read:
Binders bind people's unwanted, painful memories into books, beautifully bound and deeply personal treasures, so that those memories can be forgotten. But it's not permanent: if the book is burnt, the memories return. Perhaps it is no surprise that there is a book with Emmett's name on it. And perhaps whatever he wanted to forget is connected with the elusive aristocrat Lucian Darnay, who seems to have strong feelings about Emmett.

I'm reminded of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, though the structure is less convoluted: the first third from Emmett's viewpoint, the middle Emmett's memories of the previous year, and the final third from Lucian's viewpoint. The story is made more suspenseful by the juxtaposition of what the characters recall: when one remembers, the other forgets.
spoilers end here

Content warnings: PG sex, violent animal death, book-burning.

I liked this very much, despite the darkness: the contrast of rural and urban lives; the horror of others knowing a secret about someone who's forgotten what happened to them or what they did; the machinations of ambitious people (no happy endings for them); the compassion of the binders, and the art of what they do.

NB I received a free copy of The Binding from NetGalley in exchange for this honest review.