Dan Rhodes: Timoleon Vieta Come Home

Reviewed by PETER WELLS*

THE Guardian describes 30-year-old Dan Rhodes as "the best new writer in Britain". The Big Issue (bible of the unemployed) calls him the most "innovative" and "intensely readable" writer at work today.

These are no small recommendations. And this book certainly is a breeze to read. I sat down, rather suspicious, and found myself racing to finish it within a couple of pleasurable hours.

The tale concerns an age-old dilemma: will a lost dog get home? Rhodes recreates the tale as if it has never been told before. He takes as his main protagonist a failed composer named Cockroft who is part Falstaff, part Lear - and wholly gay. He lives in a rundown house in Italy and is magnificently maudlin. He is kept company by a mongrel with the most enchanting eyes. This is the dog of the title.

Enter a threat in the form of a Bosnian - unnamed. The Bosnian is handsome and monosyllabic. It is part of Rhodes' skill that he allows a miasma of threat to settle over the Umbrian landscape like a layer of pollution.

Pretty soon it feels like an early Polanski film. There is a sexual vibe, and there is also a sense of latent violence about to explode. The Bosnian manages to persuade a tragically drunken Cockroft to take the dog to Rome, where it is abandoned. So far, so straightforward.

It is at this point Rhodes becomes "innovative". The story fractures into a set of prisms as we pass through the lives of a number of people who see, befriend, or do not befriend the lost dog. It immediately tries to get home. But we the readers are on a different journey. We glimpse a lonely Welsh girl, betrayed by her Roman Lothario, befriending the pooch. Once we glimpse the dog only in a photograph looked at in Cambodia.

These tales are eloquent and shaped in a way the reader subconsciously identifies as age-old. They are like Grimms' fairy stories, like the enchanting stories Oscar Wilde told his children. But they are all dressed in modern clothing - genetic defects, language schools, land mines.

As a pet-lover, I was ready to weep tears of joy at the reunion. But back at base awaits the ominous Bosnian. Early on in the novel he says, watching two Italians fighting in the street, "it is two ... histories on collision". Rhodes masterfully builds up a narrative which is about two histories - one sentimental, one violent - in collision.

I felt genuinely shocked by the conclusion. Rhodes has written a frequently delightful book. He is a natural writer. It isn't a book I would give my great-aunt. But to quote from the immortal text from Lassie Come Home which is on the frontispiece: " ... dogs are owned by men, and men are bludgeoned by fate".

Canongate, $34.95

* Peter Wells is an Auckland writer and film-maker.