Do you know the novels of Dan Rhodes? I ask because his books would appeal, I believe, to many readers. But he avoids journalism, does not belong to any literary groups or contemporary schools of writing and is very much an individual novelist. He neither pursues fame nor patronizes his readers. What he believes is what you get: sensitivity, humour, sadness and devastating shock. Sometimes I have been so saddened, so shocked, that I have stopped reading and put the book aside. But before long I am compelled to pick it up again and read on. And what I have read has found a place in my imagination.
I have never met Dan Rhodes, but I have followed the outlines of his career. He was born in 1972, spent his early years in Kent and Devon and attended the Polytechnic of Wales (now the University of Glamorgan) where he took a creative writing course led by Helen Dunmore. Later he went on the Master’s course there. His personal tutor was Sheenagh Pugh (who is acknowledged in his first novel). What she and others did was to edit what he wrote and, although he took ‘an unpleasantly gladiatorial approach to the classes’, he acknowledges that as a result he learnt how to write succinctly and clearly – though not how to get published.
The next chapter in his career was teaching publishers how and why they should publish him. His first book contained 101 stories each of exactly 101 words. It had the title Anthropology: And a Hundred Other Stories and was turned down by several publishers before being brought out in 2000. This was followed by a second collection of comic and unsettling stories of sex and romance, Don’t Tell Me the Truth about Love (2001), which he had written at university. There were, he later explained, four main reasons for writing his early books: to impress pretty girls; to make fun of his own romantic vicissitudes; to earn some money; and to entertain people.
His first novel Timoleon Vieta Come
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Subscribe now or Sign inDo you know the novels of Dan Rhodes? I ask because his books would appeal, I believe, to many readers. But he avoids journalism, does not belong to any literary groups or contemporary schools of writing and is very much an individual novelist. He neither pursues fame nor patronizes his readers. What he believes is what you get: sensitivity, humour, sadness and devastating shock. Sometimes I have been so saddened, so shocked, that I have stopped reading and put the book aside. But before long I am compelled to pick it up again and read on. And what I have read has found a place in my imagination.
I have never met Dan Rhodes, but I have followed the outlines of his career. He was born in 1972, spent his early years in Kent and Devon and attended the Polytechnic of Wales (now the University of Glamorgan) where he took a creative writing course led by Helen Dunmore. Later he went on the Master’s course there. His personal tutor was Sheenagh Pugh (who is acknowledged in his first novel). What she and others did was to edit what he wrote and, although he took ‘an unpleasantly gladiatorial approach to the classes’, he acknowledges that as a result he learnt how to write succinctly and clearly – though not how to get published. The next chapter in his career was teaching publishers how and why they should publish him. His first book contained 101 stories each of exactly 101 words. It had the title Anthropology: And a Hundred Other Stories and was turned down by several publishers before being brought out in 2000. This was followed by a second collection of comic and unsettling stories of sex and romance, Don’t Tell Me the Truth about Love (2001), which he had written at university. There were, he later explained, four main reasons for writing his early books: to impress pretty girls; to make fun of his own romantic vicissitudes; to earn some money; and to entertain people. His first novel Timoleon Vieta Come Home (2003) is a more ambitious and demanding work. It earned him a place among the Twenty Best Young British Novelists chosen by Granta, but being conscripted into this ramshackle Falstaffian army and put on public parade was not his style. He felt uncomfortable and out-of-step. The title of his novel was taken from the T‒V volume of an encyclopaedia (from Timoleon, a fourth-century BC Greek soldier who murdered his brother and liberated Sicily, to Franciscus Vieta, a sixteenth-century French mathematician who anticipated modern algebra). An eponymous black mongrel with large ears and eyes ‘as pretty as a little girl’s’ arrives at a farmhouse in Umbria. The owner, a disgraced homosexual composer called Cockroft who lives there in retirement, comes to love this mongrel, talking to it as to a human being. But a few pages into the novel, and five years later, another stranger arrives, a Bosnian who has never been to Bosnia. He is a disagreeable and dangerous man, but also tall and handsome, and he pays his rent every Wednesday evening with a delirious act of fellatio. Unfortunately the two visitors, man and dog, hate each other so violently that Cockroft is obliged to evict one of them. The Bosnian has a solution to the problem. He had been taught to kill dogs at school. ‘They feel nothing,’ he explains. ‘I think maybe they enjoy it.’ Instead, Cockroft persuades himself that he has been preventing a wild animal from enjoying wild adventures and decides to leave Timoleon Vieta at the Colosseum in Rome, an aesthetically pleasing place where there are other dogs to talk to and cats to chase, and plenty of food from tourists. He will have the time of his life. What then follows is a modern version of Eric Knight’s 1940 bestseller Lassie Come-Home. Our irresistible mongrel soon acquires many other names – Abbondio, Teg and Leonardo da Vinci among others – given by people in whose lives he briefly appears over the forty-nine days of his travels home. By the time he approaches his destination he has become bone-thin and moves like a ghost dog, his beautiful eyes increasingly worried. Everything ends dramatically where it began: outside the farmhouse in Umbria. Love is also the theme of Dan Rhodes’s second novel, Gold (2007). Here he explores its mysteries and anxieties and introduces us to those who have learnt how to exist without it. The story is centred in The Anchor, a public house on the coast of Pembrokeshire, where we get to know its regular drinkers. They are like shadows who have found shelter there. It is not surprising that Dan Rhodes admires Chekhov. He has his own way of interweaving tragedy and comedy. They are two sides of the same coin, what one feels and what one thinks, and can come down on either side when he spins his stories. The main character in Gold is Miyuki Woodward, a Japanese girl who is actually Welsh. She has been coming to The Anchor for eight or nine years, not seeking adventure, but avoiding worry. She is a lesbian and lives happily with Grindl in a small town in one of the Welsh valleys. They are interior decorators. Twice each year one or the other goes away on holiday. Grindl goes to crowded cities abroad for her two weeks – and we never know what she is feeling. Miyuki comes to this small village on the Pembrokeshire coast – and we do know her feelings. Despite herself, she has grown closer to these drinkers and their Monday quizzes. The drinkers’ opponents, called ‘The Children from Previous Relationships’, are musicians who have never played in public or practised in private. Nor have they ever won a quiz – except on the famous evening when the other team failed to arrive. Their leader is Septic Barry who gets his name from maintaining septic tanks. He is a master in the art of romance. He warns his team that during the following ten months they must practise their music and finally play it in public at his wedding. Knowing that all good things have to end, they reluctantly agree. But why shouldn’t good things last and bad things end? This is the question that Miyuki asks herself and it leads to a daring experiment. On clear evenings one of the rocks in the cove below lights up for a few minutes as if it had turned to gold. This golden moment, she believes, gives passers-by a glimpse of happiness before it vanishes. But does it have to vanish? Could she not do something to improve on nature? Her plan is to become an external decorator and spray a skin of golden paint over the magic rock. The coin spins and spins again: how will it land? The suspense is measured when, no one saying God Bless You, Miyuki has a sudden avalanche of sneezes reminiscent of the famous nursery rhyme:For a decade Dan Rhodes has been writing his version of The Divine Comedy. The Anchor was his purgatory. And in his next novel Little Hands Clapping (2010), he invites us to visit hell. This is the darkest and most terrifying of his novels, set in an undistinguished German museum which, despite the owner’s devastating good intentions, encourages visitors to hide themselves away at closing time and then commit suicide. Each room of the museum is numbered and has a cautionary theme: ‘Famous Failures’, ‘Unfortunate Survivors’ – and there is a parade of brilliant writers on view from Sylvia Plath to Virginia Woolf. But what is that crunching sound you may hear early in the first chapter? It is the old grey caretaker in his narrow bed slowly devouring a live house spider that has darted into his mouth, as they often do at night. He will have to get up early next morning for he has heard some familiar sounds downstairs. It will be his duty to superintend matters: carefully to take down the body hanging from the rope he has supplied, then to ring the doctor, summon the police and also help the doctor drive the corpse away to his macabre group of freezers at home. But please, gentle reader, do not be upset. It may be an act of mercy: after all there is very little struggle and a final end to pain. And there is no criminal involved – simply some small financial gain for the curator now that the visitors no longer need the money they had when they entered the museum. So how do we define hell? It is where people without emotion, humanity or imagination live. Dan Rhodes’s fifth novel, This Is Life (2012), has a very different atmosphere. It is essentially a happy book, a farewell to tragedy. One of the characters has bought a translation of Timoleon Vieta Come Home ‘to depress a friend of mine who’s been a bit too happy lately’, he explains. Although love is triumphant there is no sentimentality in the writing – it is a masterpiece of storytelling. Within the novel ‘This Is Life’ is a hugely successful theatre presentation where for many weeks and months a man and a woman can do what we all do: make love, get out of bed, go to the toilet, have breakfast and so on day after day. Audiences are mesmerized when they see it – and what it means to be alive. For here, mirroring their own lives though without any clouds of darkness, they may catch a vision of heaven. Dan Rhodes has never believed that publishers are a writer’s best friend. That has not been his experience. But for his most recent novel, When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow (2014) he found a perfect publisher: he brought it out himself. Now a new imprint, Aardvark Bureau, is to take over its publication. I have been warned not to give away the plot. All I may say is that it is a variation of Voltaire’s Candide – and I hope someone will soon make a musical of it.Ring-a ring of roses,
A pocket full of posies,
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 50 © Michael Holroyd 2016
About the contributor
Having written about actors and dramatists, Michael Holroyd is rumoured to be writing a play.