Book review: Little Hands Clapping by Dan Rhodes

BOOK
Little Hands Clapping, by Dan Rhodes
Canongate, £10.99
4/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Dan Rhodes presents a modern grim fairytale that takes the reader to a blackly comic world peopled by eccentrics, romantics and monsters.

REVIEW
Enter the macabre world of Dan Rhodes at your peril, for within its dark recesses are gruesome secrets that are reliably modern yet as as old as tradition.

The action is mostly set in a German museum dedicated to suicide. Overseen by a grey man who wants nothing more than to be left alone, the museum has, to his dismay, become a magnet for an assortment of grim (and Grimm) characters.

The old man, the seemingly good Dr Frohlicher, the beautiful but tortured Madalena and the grotesque townsfolk all find themselves bound together by this lugubrious showpiece.

Rhodes' lucid prose is deceptively simple. He is bursting with stories - no character is deprived a quirk, a back story, a purpose - yet he writes at the pace of a funeral cortege.

He delights in his creations and their predicaments and they come to form part of the folklore of your psyche for the duration of the book - but he never forgets to undercut his sinister aspect with a droll one-liner that acknowledges precisely how far we have to travel to meet him halfway.

As with all fairytales, good and bad are finally returned to their respective boxes. While Rhodes might dwell on the dark side for a lifetime, the reader gets to see the world the right way round again before bedtime.

Affecting stuff.

– March 9, 2010