BOOK REVIEW: No Sense of Limits by Araceli Aipoh
By HENRY AKUBUIRO
Sunday, December 11, 2005

At three hundred and eighty pages, Araceli Aipoh’s romance, No Sense of Limits, is close to a whooper, and so is the magnitude of its exploration. Set in Lagos, the novel identifies with the frankly bizarre. The plot is like one big uncharted ocean where the high society swims towards self-destruction because of the entanglement of love.
The end effect of the novel echoes a lesson in revenge-morality and a haunting metaphor for cruel destinies.
Born in Philippines, Araceli Aipho is married to a Nigerian medical doctor and has lived in the country for eighteen years, the last nine in Lagos.

But the Lagos we encounter in No Sense of Limits is more of a faction than fiction. Ikeja, Third Mainland Bridge, Victoria Island, streets and roads mentioned in the novel are not elusive. The complexion of the city has a typical tinge of via dolorosa – that fusion of the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the rich and the poor. But, reading through the pages, you cannot blur the distinction between death and decay on one hand, and life and affluence on the other.

The former is embarrassingly overwhelming. The novel centres on four high-class women: Victoria, Elizabeth, Laura and Kate. But, unarguably, the first two and daughters of the wealthy Lagosian, Gabriel Crooker, are the major characters. Their love life is entangled in crises and the repercussions are disastrous for them and everybody around them.

The dark forbodding is so glaring from the opening pages: " ‘You can’t buy love but pay for it’, Greg said as he and Laura slowly turned away from the grave…" (p.3). The grave referred to here is that of Kate who shoots Elizabeth thereby eliciting the same response from the man they are fighting for, Greg. But the death of these two and, by extension, Gabriel Crooker, could have been avoided if it had not been for the mistake of Elizabeth in misinterpreting the information she gathers from her late husband-to-be, Eden’s diary.

Flashbacks and foreshadowing lead us to the heart of the matter: Kate has informed Victoria, Jide’s wife, that her husband has been having an affair with her sister Elizabeth, and she is contemplating eliminating her for that "betrayal" – and this is just the beginning of the end. What of the beginning itself?
Gabriel Crooker, owner of Bridge Trust Bank, has two daughters of distinctive qualities. Elizabeth in the prettier one, Victoria the more intelligent. While Elizabeth is more reserved, Victoria is more composed and gracefully. Elizabeth finds real love in Eden, but a week to their wedding, Eden dies in a road accident.

Her emotional turbulence borders on derangement. But the plot takes a new twist when Elizabeth, on a visit to late Eden house, discovers his diary where he wrote about his meetings with Victoria, her sister. Of course, her interpretation of the meetings is straightforward: amorous. Thus, she decides to plot for revenge.

Jide, Victoria’s husband, is all the world to her; their marriage is predestined. An undergraduate, Victoria’s car bumps into his on Third Mainland Bridge. As it turns out, when they meet in a hotel to sort out how to repair Jide’s car, Cupid shoots its arrow, and the two fall in love, leading to marriage. As the story progresses, Elizabeth is now heading the father’s bank BTB. Despite the allure of her job, she is desirous of having an affair with Jide. From its supernova beginning, the novel descends to frivolity, as the novelist captures all the trifles Elizabeth encounters in the office. At a point, it seems the novel is circling around itself, barely moving an inch to excitement.

Kate’s desire for Greg, another subplot, typifies the paradox of life. Greg rather has his eyes elsewhere on Elizabeth, his childhood friend. A lawyer, Kate’s climb to the upper echelon of society is by dint of her effort. From prostitution, she is able to train herself as a lawyer. Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s ruse is beginning to manifest. Her first attempt to seduce Jide at home is met with great bewilderment. But on a third try, Jide falls to her hankering, and hence begins constant sex romp, to his wife’s ignorance.

Aipoh is an apostle of cliff-hanging tradition. She introduces a shocker when Victoria discloses to her sister that, before her husband died, he was arranging a secret birthday party for her, with her collaboration. It has now dawned on Elizabeth that she is the one guilty of infidelity. The meetings her late husband had with her sister was after all for her own good, not for sex.

The coming of Greg into Elizabeth’s wife proves rather fatal. But the conduit for this tragedy is one Taiwo, Greg’s dismissed driver, who is later employed by the desperate Kate to be her spy on Greg, the man of her dream. Now that Kate is armed with the joker in the pack – Elizabeth sex escapades with Jide – she is ready to release the bombshell to Victoria in a bid to set up the two sisters for enmity and mar the latter’s relationship with Greg, paving the way for her. Good thought.

Expectedly, Elizabeth is shocked that the secret has been hiding all the while, except from Greg, has blown open, and, concerned that Greg is behind it, takes a gun to shoot him. As luck would have it, Kate stops her in her track, and in the ensuring confusion, Kate shoots Elizabeth, killing her. Greg, disappointed with the turn of event, shoots and kills Kate. Gabriel Crooker, Elizabeth father, dies thereafter. For Laura, it rains and pours: Mommy dies after revealing that she (Laura) is the misbegotten child of Gabriel Crooker.
Now she cannot reunite with her father again. What a pity!

No Sense of Limits is told in a flowing language, sometimes poetic, but it suffers from minor mechanical inaccuracies. Examples are: “… continued to attack (guzzle) the food" (pg. 113), "Vigil night" (p. 302) instead of "vigil", "…under the employment of..." (p.330) Instead of "…in the employ of…", etc. Again, the author relies on a stroke of deux ex machina to save Greg from dying for letting the cat out of the bag to his subordinates. The author is not fair to Gabriel Crooker at all. What explains his death? And should Greg, despite his litany of evils, be the one to have the final laugh? Besides, Emeka’s existence in the story is questionable. What is his contribution to the plot development?

No Sense of Limits, despite its blemishes, cannot be begrudged of its fantastic stylistic elements. The subject matter is a departure from the hackneyed bewailing of societal aberrations. Here misplaced aggression, vanities, indiscretions and nemesis are interwoven in suspense to produce a most entertaining read.