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Within the world of The Binding, books are things of beauty, covered in black velvet inlaid with pearls or bound in silk and shimmering like silver.

… when they leave they’re sucked dry, bound for the last time so they don’t remember anything, they’ll deny he ever touched them, they’ll tell everyone he’s a lovely man, delightful, and if every anyone tries to do something to stop him … He laughs, because he’s safe. Memories, he discovers, can be stolen, treated as a commodity just like sugar or soap and sold for amusement and profit by manipulative, powerful figures.īridget Collins reveals a world of exploitation in which members of the aristocracy use bindings to hide their abuse of female servants. What he comes to learn troubles him even more deeply. Which was worse? To feel nothing, or to grieve for something you no longer remembered? Surely when you forgot, you’d forget to be sad, or what was the point? And yet that numbness would take part of your self away, it would be like pins and needles in your soul…

They are no longer themselves.įor the young apprentice binder Emmett Farmer the moment of binding wrenches out the deepest part of a person, leaving a hole in its place. It takes away not just their memories but the essence of their character. It’s so complete a cleansing process that it leaves the participants as mere shells of their former selves.

The first is that the people whose memories are erased are not made whole again by their binding. It sounds like the perfect cure but Bridget Collins shows us there are two problems with binding. Your most traumatic memories are bound between the covers of a book and wiped clean away. The Binding is based on a markedly original idea about memories and books.īridget Collins imagines a world in which you engage the services of a book binder and whatever was causing you distress or pain can be erased from your memory.