Book Review: Timolean Vieta Come Home

The book club choice for July, and I think it received most votes on account of being the smallest of the three selections on offer, and also having relatively large print. Everyone knew that, even if it was crap, it would be a short and easy read.

I nearly didn't get past page seven. The sentence "His then boyfriend, a middle-aged Austrian music publisher whose name had slipped from memory but whose big, grey moustache and fierce, hooded eyes lingered on, had just announced that he was going to sleep in the spare room that night, and that Cockcroft could suck his own stupid penis for a change." brought me to an abrupt stop, wondering whether I really wanted to read any more like that (assuming there would be some more). But I was reminded of the reaction of another book club member from years back - she hasn't been to the meetings for about three years - to a line in a book I had recommended. May's The Many-Coloured Land. One of the minor characters says something about "having to get himself some gash" on his return from a long space mission, a sentence which had had a similar effect on her, back then, as Dan Rhodes' line had just had on me. I resolved to plod on.

Only it wasn't really plodding. The book did indeed turn out to be a very easy, if somewhat unstimulating and unsatisfying, read. Its online reviews frequently make much of Rhodes' beautifully crafted prose. A shame, then, that someone with such talent for the written word should use them to say not very much of any interest. The book is a series of short stories masquerading as a novel, with the stories thinly connected by the meanderings of the eponymous dog, who has been kicked out on account of the antipathy of his owner Cockcroft's latest lover. Cockcroft himself, his life, loves past and present, and many failures - as a composer, friend, lover and even human being - feature large in those parts of the book not devoted to the many characters the dog meets on his travels, but as Rhodes gives us little or nothing to like about Cockcroft, his reminiscences and liaisons never get under the reader's skin. Since the dog himself is little more than a narrative device, he elicits no sympathy either, and the people he meets and whose stories we read about in the aforementioned lambent prose, are come and gone in an instant far too brief for empathy or identification.

So once again, a book club read has left me with a huge feeling of "so what?" It's true that it is far more enjoyable to read a well-written book than a poorly written one, but no matter how well written it is, if the subject matter is nothing more than a loose agglomeration of everyday people doing everyday things, what IS the point? I may as well have been watching Emmerdale.