Timoleon Vieta Come Home (Paperback)

I feel this way about Dan Rhodes. After reading the short story collection "Don't tell me the truth about love", I was excited about this new author. Here was an author who could conjure a whole, fairy-tale universe with a few phrases. Here was an author who looked unflinchingly at the dark side of love, who could lovingly portray bitterness, aching rejection and the cruel randomness of it all, while entertaining us and making us laugh at the same time. When I heard that he had written a novel I couldn't wait to read it, and see how these strange new worlds would look on the expansive format of the novel.

Well, there's good news and bad news. "Timoleon Vieta" is just as entertaining, funny and beautifully written as Rhodes' two previous books. But it's the same kind of thing! And here's the rub. I'm probably just been ungrateful, because there is a lot of greatness in "Timoleon Vieta". The main character Cockroft, the ageing, slightly bitter, homosexual composer, is a great comic creation. The mysterious character The Bosnian, who invades Cockroft's cosy life in rural Italy, is fantastic at first, until we find out more about him, and he becomes slightly one-dimensional. The way The Bosnian takes seriously Cockroft's flippant comment about how to pay the rent in lieu of money is at once hilarious and disgusting.

"Timoleon Vieta" is, like "Anthropology" and "Don't tell me the truth about love" before it, about the dark side of love. In this story, the simple love of the dog Timoleon Vieta for his master, Cockroft, is usurped by the lonely old man's desire to please the handsome, mysterious Bosnian. The Bosnian hates the dog, and he persuades Cockroft, in a moment of drunken madness, to drive somewhere far away and abandon Timoleon Vieta. After this act of befuddled, desperate selfishness by Cockroft, the story concerns Timoleon Vieta's attempts to get home to his beloved master, and Rhodes beautifully tells the tales of the people encountered by the dog as he makes his way home.

At this point, the novel stops resembling a novel, and encroaches back onto territory Rhodes has visited before - the short story. The people the dog encounters all have a tale of twisted love to tell. Rhodes cleverly weaves all the narratives together, much in the way David Mitchell did with his debut novel "Ghostwritten". So as well as the story of Cockroft and his dog, we get extra twisted fairy tales, such as the one about the strange, predestined love affair between a goody two-shoes deaf girl and the town juvenile delinquent, or the one about the young Cambodian girl's love for her childhood friend. It's clever, and the stories are great, but I couldn't help feeling a little disappointed, because I was expecting a novel, but "Timoleon Vieta" is more of a "sort of" novel.

But that's just selfish griping. I'm slightly disappointed, but I'd be crestfallen if Dan Rhodes wasn't writing. "Timoleon Vieta" is well-constructed, the different stories are woven together beautifully, it's wonderfully written and it makes you laugh out loud some times, but makes you feel achingly sad other times. Like Rhodes' previous offerings, the book looks at the darkness and sheer illogicality of love with a perceptive, sympathetic eye that makes it worth more than a million Tony Parsons novels. The main weakness of the book is the way The Bosnian's character is developed. The part in which The Bosnian's past is fully revealed is unconvincing, and it jars with the style and setting of the rest of the book.

This is well worth a try for any fan of good, interesting fiction who has loved and lost, loved and not been loved back, loved and dumped, loved and been dumped, or just fancied the girl down the road. It's quite a strange little book, but then we're strange little people...!