An unintentional gatecrasher

The months from November to February are officially the wedding months, at least in Bangladesh. Because in these months, you’re able to eat polao without breaking a sweat, and wear beautiful, heavy attire without succumbing to suffocation. So, in this season, what better book to read than a one about weddings? The Wedding People is such a novel that will satiate your hunger for wedding-related drama. It’s a perfect read for anyone who is not getting married or invited to a wedding this year. Reading this book, they will be attending a wedding in their imagination.

The protagonist, Phoebe Stone is an adjunct professor and a Victorianist—researcher of 19th century novels. Divorce, miscarriage, and the death of a beloved pet cat leave Phoebe struggling with the normality of daily life. Unable to handle the misfortunes, Phoebe eventually decides to end her life. She meticulously plans her death so that she can have one last good time before dying. Additionally, she wants to make her death as little messy as possible, such as preventing any blood from spilling, as she cannot bear to inflict pain on the person who will have to clean after the bloodstains from the carpet. As a result, she books a five star hotel, Cornwall Inn, for one day, which makes a significant dent in her lifelong savings account. She imagines herself indulging in food, then gulping down her cat’s tuna-flavoured painkiller and lying in the comfortable bed with a canopy, and drifting into an eternal sleep—a simple, clean, and easy death.

But there’s a glitch in the perfect plan. The hotel Phoebe books is hosting a week-long wedding. The hotel has been booked exclusively for the wedding, ensuring an intimate celebration for the couple and their families. Initially, everyone mistakes Phoebe for one of the guests. Trouble begins when the bride, Lila, learns about the uninvited intruder and her plan for the evening. Thus, she embarks on a mission to safeguard her wedding ceremony. Lila will do anything to save her big day because it was her dying father’s last wish to see his daughter get married. After his death, Lila does her utmost to keep his wish and throws a luxurious, dreamy wedding. She won’t let Phoebe, or her corpse, ruin her father’s last wish. A spiralling chaos ensues as they both adamantly pursue their plans for the week.      

Although The Wedding People deals with sensitive issues such as depression and suicide, it is done in a light-hearted and an endearingly humorous way. Lila and Phoebe both lost someone they love, whom they assumed would remain a constant in their lives, forgetting how life can be unrelentingly cruel. Through them, The Wedding People shows the difficulty of accepting a loss as they yearn for the familiar stability of their past. The story reveals how someone can take extreme measures to replace their loss. In preserving the essence of their past, people often invite disaster into their lives and the lives of those around them. In the hope of attaining the same comfort from a past that is lost to time, they delay facing the nature of their reality, cocooning themselves in delusion. Espach discusses these elements delicately, guiding Lila and Phoebe to, finally, move on. 

On the other hand, the comical antics employed by Espach sometimes fall short and become redundant after a while. Nonetheless, I’ll still recommend this book for light reading and for a good laugh. Because having a fake best friend and being her fake maid of honour tops any storyline about a fake billionaire boyfriend who falls for a girl of modest means.

Tahmina Hossain is first and foremost a reader, a lover of literature, and then a writer. If you enjoy rambling about literature like her, then reach out at literary.ramblings.by.t@gmail.com.