What stands good literary writing apart is how it often succeeds in drawing readers into its plot vortex, holding them bound in its whirl, only releasing them after it has climaxed.

In that end, the readers might be purged of their soaked-up emotions, fulfilling Aristotle’s centuries-old purgatory promise of literature. To read Abimbola Dare’s The Last Wedding Anniversary, published by Quramo Publishing, is to experience such rare literary-induced purgatory process.

This is quite remarkable as Dare has taken on a commonplace human story about marriage, about love, that is threatening to keel over after its very foundational support, trust, is assailed by its expected antithesis, mistrust.

A sudden sense of deja vu – have I not seen this before? – might not be an unexpected immediate feeling for a reader as they read the first few pages of the novel, which, in fact, might read like script for a domestic thriller.

However, the story’s thrills lie in Dare’s graceful narrative facility shown in how she has weaved an unpretentiously complex plot around a woman whose hitherto secure trust in her God, her husband, her family, and herself will not secure her from her mind’s mistrust over her ability to become a mother, having repeatedly miscarries.

The story central character, Celine’s internal conflict, which springs from those hurting miscarriages, frames the story-world external conflicts. Suddenly resorting to harrowing introspections, Celine becomes not only distrustful of her doting husband, but also goes so deep into the long closed recesses of her mind to haul out childhood hurts.

The resultant primal trip back to her parents’ failed marriage becomes essentially an insidious measuring glass whose distorted images addle her perception of the state of her own marriage, and of her relationships with her sister, and everyone, and God.

Suddenly, every act, mundane or extraordinary, is read in light of how her father had been a roguish jerk who betrayed her perfect mother.

Reading every action and all object for their ominous signs of what to come, Celine will precipitously fall into her belief of betrayal by God who fails to replicate her own steadfastness; and by her husband who seems too unfazed to her state to not have been involved in some untoward affairs.

Celine will thus become a prissy detector trailing her husband’s every move in their house, out of their house, to his work, to everywhere; and to her making her expected discovering: Biyi is what her father was; even more, Biyi is not cheating with his domestic maid as her father had, but with his sister-in-law!

With the way the narration arcs up to that putatively climactic moment of discovery, what then unfurls the authentic reality of the tense situations in the world of the story will not but jolt the readers to the author’s mastery of narrative twist.

The story’s twist brings to focus its sharp ironies, all more signposted by its title. The reader might learn in the story, however, that the last can truly become the first after a redemptive, but troubled journey.

Meanwhile, the story’s plot recalls a cheetah’s blistering dash at its target that lasts few seconds as a cheetah cannot keep up with its own electrifying sprint for a long haul. The novel’s relatively few pages – 241 – are packed with jet-speed narratives that sometimes make reader grasp for water respite.

More, the Bolt-speed is deployed for a criss-crossing narration that refuses to yield its ultimate secret until the novel’s last few pages. In those last resolving pages, there could seem the author might lose her controlling rein on her fictional creations, and so rushed to settle the conflicts of the story.

However, none of the story’s parts seems out of sync from its plot whole.

In fact, Dare’s greatest feat, in The Last Wedding Anniversary, could be said to be the way she has masterfully steered the course of its plots, when she could just have settled for an easy, tried and tested, escapist hurtle towards an otherwise anticipated story-end.

*First published in Digirature.