Fiction: From the 101 very short stories in his first book, Anthropology, to the slightly longer short stories in his second book, Don't Tell Me The Truth About Love, Dan Rhodes has now worked himself up to a novel. Fans of earlier work, though, won't be disappointed: it's episodic, writes Ian Sansom.
Timoleon Vieta is a dog, a mongrel, with eyes "as pretty as a little girl's". His owner, Carthusians Cockroft, lives alone in the Italian countryside.Cockroft is an English eccentric abroad, a self-styled "conductor, composer, raconteur", whose work includes Wrens, a musical "about a good-hearted but misguided scientist who was secretly breeding killer wrens the size of emperor penguins in his underground laboratory". His music for the television programme, Bibbly and the Bobblies, was made "by taperecording his farts and belches". His great classical work, Rape of the Seas, "had foundered after he was offered salmon at a dinner party."
Cockroft is old, gay, and devoted to his dog, and he offers strangers the opportunity to stay with him in his lovely home, as long as they repay him once a week by indulging him in his favourite sexual practice.
One day a young man arrives at Cockroft's home. He claims he is from Bosnia. He needs a place to stay. He grudgingly agrees to Cockcroft's unusual terms and conditions. He hates Timoleon Vieta.
There are 88 pages of all this, competently told and rather amusing, and then the Bosnian persuades Cockroft to abandon Timoleon Vieta in Rome; what follows, in a further 100 pages more, are a lot of short shaggy-dog stories. They're more than amusing. Or less than amusing - some of them are very sad. Some of them are quite brilliant.
Timoleon Vieta starts to make his way back home, through Rome and across the Italian countryside, and Rhodes tells the stories of the individuals whose lives he touches: Cosimo the policeman and his artist wife; the Welsh girl abandoned by her Italian boyfriend; Mai, the Chinese orphan; the brilliant, deaf Aurora and her tearaway boyfriend.
At its best, Timoleon Vieta Come Home resembles Italo Calvino's Difficult Loves and Alberto Moravia's The Voice of the Sea, which is saying something. As one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists, Rhodes clearly has a firm grasp of passionate misunderstandings and hopeless undertakings. It's almost enough to make you cry.
Ian Sansom's The Truth About Babies is published by Granta
Timoleon Vieta Come Home: A Sentimental Journey. By Dan Rhodes, Canongate, 214pp, £9.99