The First Binding by R. R. Virdi

The First Binding (Tales of Tremaine #1)
By R. R. Virdi
Tor, 2022

It’s a well-known literary truism that authors are often great burdens to their own books, and if that was true in the days before social media, how much more true is it now, when every latte-slurping ninny with a set of hand-me-down hot takes can trumpet them to the whole Republic of Letters? Nowadays, instead of worrying about their authors cavorting in the Seagram building fountain, publishers have to worry about their authors spouting off on Twitter and either making lots of enemies or all the wrong friends. 

So maybe even in these latter days there are heads shaking at Tor over author R. R. Virdi, making his mainstream debut with a fat fantasy novel, The First Binding and pinning a comment on Goodreads about how much he’s read great works of fantasy and literature looking in vain for his own face staring back at him. He writes in such comments that his aim is to bring his own heritage to the page; “I wanted to do for South Asian mythology and stories what Tolkien did for European,” he writes, and these ambitions might account for the undeniably exotic feel of some elements of The First Binding. 

Thankfully, all other notes of petulant entitlement in his Goodreads note are entirely absent from this big, grand book. The First Binding is an elaborate tale that begins in a land call Etaynia, on the “Golden Road” that is this world’s multi-ethnic version of the Silk Road. A woman named Eloine coaxes from a man named Ari the long story of his life and deeds, starting with his childhood working in a popular theater run by one of the lower-caste “Sullied,” where he watched everything, listened to everything, and was wary of everything. “I hadn’t quite learned yet as a child, but life is filled with storms,” the older Ari reflects. “The number never changes. It will rain as hard and as often as it’s wont to do. The only thing we can change is whether or not we will learn to sing in the rain. For it will rain all the same.” 

His wariness very much extends to Koli, the nefarious leader of the largest local thuggee band, and his young life is dramatically changed by two meetings: one with a “binder” (a sorcerer commanding the elements) named Mahrab, and the other with a charismatic man named Mithu, who has no patience for the back-alley evil of somebody like Koli and who extends Ari the warmth of his own family. Like all the many characters in this book, Mithu is skillfully painted even in the description of his person:

His clothing spoke silently of wealth. He wore a matching set of shirt and pants the color of brilliant carmine. His shoes were pointed, clean despite the dirt road, and threaded with gold lace. And every bit of it fit him as if it had been stitched solely for his body, which was lean in a way no starving man’s could be. This man ate, and well, but he held on to none of the fat.

The larger organization of the narrative is so well-taken that readers ought to remember how badly it could have gone some other way. Virdi is a masterful storyteller, and he cannily plays to his own strengths by making his book an intricate webwork of stories-within-stories. Ari himself is a professional storyteller, and he’s also essentially the living accumulation of all his own stories, as are we all. The First Binding is styled as the first in a series called “Tales of Tremaine” (again stressing the telling of tales), and Virdi displays the confidence (or perhaps urgent vision) to take his time in unfolding his larger narrative; more than a few readers will finish this book thinking it was much more verbiage than muscle, a bit slow, maybe even a bit self-indulgent. But it reads like almost nothing else currently being written in the genre, and its latticework of stories pulls the reader in right from the start. It’s an impressive performance; it earns its author the right to take his time. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.