Everything that is masterful about The Last Woman, John Bemrose’s follow-up to his 2004 debut novel, The Island Walkers, is on display in the book’s first three chapters—but only, perhaps, on second read. The first time through is certainly pleasurable (“The sun suffers through a cloudless sky,” the author begins, revealing his oft-demonstrated eye for the evocative verb), but it’s only after the novel ends that one can go back and appreciate how much he accomplishes in the eight pages that introduce his three main characters.

First, there is the gauzily poetic chapter depicting a woman at a window—Ann, we later learn—whose lazy day in Ontario’s cottage country is interrupted by entrancing news. Next, there is the arrival of a stranger—”Billy, is that you? Oh my God, Billy!” an imagined woman (the one we just met?) shrieks near the chapter’s close—who infuses the book with the energy of “the rhythmic scuff of his boots.” And then there is the plain-spoken third chapter—
focusing on Richard, the faintly trembling fixed point around whom Ann’s depressive painter’s life will be shown to revolve—which sets up Bemrose’s chief concerns: the love triangle between these three intensely introspective people, and the past that fuels it.

The bulk of The Last Woman alternates between two narratives. Intertwined through the main story of Billy’s re-engagement with Ann and Richard is a history covering Billy and Ann’s teenage romance, Ann and Richard’s courtship, and Richard and Billy’s failed prosecution of a land claim on behalf of the reservation where Billy grew up. Though the novel’s tone is relentlessly downbeat (“Happy people don’t think,” Ann proclaims), and its action pulses in fits and starts, Bemrose’s freighted prose powers the plot onward: “Beauty promised peace and delivered war,” Richard reflects after meeting Ann.

And deliver her beauty does. The Last Woman’s greatest success is its near-Tolstoian unfolding of the psychology of love triangles. It rapidly becomes clear that Billy’s ten-year exile has passed like an instant for both him and Ann, with the absent other remaining a presence even as Ann’s marriage has grown to include a child. With renewal now a possibility, what was a presence becomes an obsession.

Weaving back and forth in time, Bemrose subtly suggests the ways in which people’s pasts can outpace them, guiding them toward destruction. The novel’s title is a reference to the painting Ann crafts as her longing for reconciliation with Billy blazes through her life; her best work, it too is a portent of personal apocalypse.

But Bemrose isn’t leading her to Anna Karenina’s fate here, and when the past finally strikes, its impact is muted, its implications open ended—even hopeful. It’s at that point that a trip back to the first ten pages is advised, to see just how much the author packed into its gestures. “One cannot read a book; one can only reread it,” Nabokov instructed. The Last Woman is the rare novel that makes the counsel worthwhile.