Love and vulgarity

When I was about half way through Little Hands Clapping, Dan Rhodes’s fifth published book, I started a list of the innocent characters on whom fate and their author play nasty tricks.

When I was about half way through Little Hands Clapping, Dan Rhodes’s fifth published book, I started a list of the innocent characters on whom fate and their author play nasty tricks. I thought of the decent doctor who marries a woman so beautiful and yet so unfaithful that it ruins his life; the two good-looking children who have eyes only for one another, until they discover that he is in fact the most beautiful man in the world and she looks quite ordinary; and the young man with a passion for opera whose rich, older wife transforms him into a Pavarotti lookalike.

Little Hands Clapping is being marketed as a ‘black comedy’. There are moments when the blackness risks smothering the comedy, but for the most part it is funny and quite horrible in equal parts. However, my list of the book’s doomed innocents was spoiled for the same reason as the novel is a remarkable success. Just when all seems quite hopeless and Rhodes appears to be willing to sacrifice even his most sympathetic characters to their naughtiest impulses, he goes soft. An unapologetic small-town love story replaces the gothic riffs on death and sex. This is bound to annoy those who hail Rhodes as a successor to Roald Dahl, but it is brave of him to attempt to engage with a fuller spectrum of emotions. It moves this book from being a finely written schoolboy fantasy into the realm of the grown-up novel.

In the middle of Germany, a museum of suicide acts as a magnet for those wanting to do themselves in.