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Dan Rhodes is disliked by...
We had planned to discreetly retire this page, but with so
many dim bulbs who Just Don’t Get It still on
the rampage it is with profound regret that we find ourselves
updating it for 2007.
For as long as Rhodes has been in the business, the critical
reception his books have received has been divided precisely
thus:
The publication of Gold has seen this pattern continue with
staggering constancy. Way back in the summer of 2006 we predicted
that some folks would get it and some folks wouldn’t,
and we were right. There have been a few reviewers whose bile
and/or incoherent babbling is so extraordinary that we believe
it deserves as wide an audience as possible. Here is a selection
of our current favourites:
Tom Adair of The
Scotsman: “Gold
is pure dross. I look forward to Rhodes’ return to form.”
We are confident that Rhodes will do everything he can to
further anger Tom Adair with his future books.
Now let’s see what Rhodes’ friends at the execrable
free newspaper Metro had to say:
“Pointless - Rhodes’s book actually manages
to be even more vacuous than the characters he writes about,
which is some achievement. *” One
star review by Claire Allfree.
Good for Claire Allfree - she’s not afraid to speak
her mind. We hope she stays reviewing books for Metro forever.
And how about the Guardian’s Saturday Review? Well,
it would be cruel for us to undertake a detailed dissection
of Carrie O’Grady’s
piece - she was clearly way out of her depth and it just wouldn’t
seem right. We’ll pick out just one nugget from her
clunking critique. Of the conversations heard in The Anchor,
she says:
“In any other novel, these solitary small-town boozers
would be hiding something behind all these platitudes, but
here their true feelings are as vague as their words.”
Let’s overlook O’Grady’s absolute failure
to grasp what is going on in the book, and concentrate on
the beginning of this sentence. In any other novel,
she writes. In any other novel. Unbelievable.
Rhodes is singled out and attacked in the national press because
his writing is not like that found in any other novel.
No further questions, Ms O’Grady.
Gold received a rave review in the Guardian’s sister
paper, The Observer, and Rhodes’ writing was lauded
by The Measure on the style pages of the Saturday magazine,
but we have come to accept that he is unlikely ever to find
favour with the Guardian’s snooty Saturday Review section.
Let’s not forget that they ignored the magnificent Anthropology
when it was first published, and that they dismissed his previous
book, The Little White Car as ‘shit lit’. Nice.
Still, it’s not necessarily an unmendable relationship.
Maybe one day Rhodes will run out of ideas and write an interminable
fictionalisation of an episode from the life of Henry James,
and they’ll love it so much they’ll give him the
front page.
We’ll wind things up with the almost unbelievable words
of Lloyd Evans of The
Daily Telegraph. Lloyd
Evans clearly needs to Get With The Programme in the taste
department, but that isn’t all. He also needs to ask
himself whether he is up to the job:
“Would a half-Japanese thirtysomething lesbian really
spend her summers wandering into pubs in Pembrokeshire..?”
Er… the book is very clearly set in the winter. Lloyd
Evans seems to have read Gold with his eyes closed. And it
is fiction, it’s not real. Unfortunately, Lloyd Evans
carries on from here, disgracing himself at every turn. This
is his take on the relationship between Miyuki and Grindl:
“Any bestselling author will tell you this is not how
to construct a romance.”
Lloyd Evans seems to be suggesting (like O’Grady
above – what on earth is going on here?) that Rhodes’
books should be like everybody else’s in their construction,
written to some kind of template. Rhodes is not any
bestselling author, and nor does he set out to be.
He sets out to be something more interesting than that. Further
on in the piece Evans seems overly concerned with the commercial
prospects of Rhodes’ books - maybe he should have been
an accountant instead of a book reviewer.
The Lloyd Evans quotes above are simply the carping of
somebody who doesn’t know brilliance when he sees it,
who doesn’t concentrate when reviewing books and who
has trouble grasping the nature of fiction, but there’s
worse here than mere carping – much worse. This is why
we at the Dan Rhodes skyscraper, here in the heart of downtown
Taipei, strongly believe that this piece of ‘work’
(it’s staggering to think he was paid for it) should
not have made it as far as the printers. Towards the end of
this rant Lloyd Evans states that “the dust jacket
carries endorsements [of Gold] from DBC Pierre, Paul Bailey,
Rose Tremain […] and Louis de Bernieres,” and
he hilariously concludes that, “They must have spotted
something I missed.” Had he been paying even the
slightest attention he would have seen that these recommendations
are clearly for Rhodes’ book Timoleon Vieta Come
Home, not for Gold. Timoleon Vieta is mentioned explicitly
in each of these quotes. And that’s a lot of
underlining. We wonder how these authors would feel about
having their words recontextualised by an apparently half
asleep, and indubitably half-arsed, book reviewer. What if
they were to find out? Would they be unhappy? We expect they
would.
This is sloppy (and, perhaps, slanderous) copy. It’s
really not for us to say, but perhaps the Telegraph should
look a little more closely at what Lloyd Evans hands in from
now on. If this display is anything to go by, there’s
a strong possibility that it will be a load of lazy, destructive,
belief-beggaring piffle.
And that’s all for now. We were going to say that such
reactions were inevitable with a work of such brilliant subtlety
as Gold, but then we looked at our pie chart and remembered
that it’s just inevitable anyway – if you write
fiction that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to
then some folks are never going to get it. We are grateful
that we are not among them. Five books in, it’s now
clear that if you don’t have taste and/or a sense of
humour, then there’s a strong possibility you will dislike
what Rhodes writes. But, thankfully, there are plenty of people
of taste out there – people like you. Here
are just some of them.
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Maggie
Gee – Saturday Review, Radio 4, on Anthropology.
“It is rather shallow...
It’s been packaged not as a ten-thousand word block
of prose, but as a novel, and that’s something that
I think is isn’t.”
This is believed
to be Rhodes’ favourite bad review. It is certainly
the most asinine. Wake up Maggie - the book is called
Anthropology and a hundred other stories. This is written
on the front cover and the spine of the book. It is also
written on the title page and on every even-numbered page
throughout the book. Nobody at any stage was trying to
present it as a novel. The author used to play a recording
of this review at readings, and never failed to be delighted
by the slack-jawed disbelief of the audience. Rhodes is
known to have written to "Deep" Maggie Gee to
inform her of this. (2007 update – sources close
to Rhodes say that this remains his favourite stupid review
of all time). |
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Cahal
Dallat – Saturday Review, Radio 4, on Anthropology.
“He’s used
an expression again and again – I was so in love
I could think of little else, I was looking forward to
our wedding so I could think of little else, My girlfriend
died and I could think of little else. It’s rather
like the death of Little Else – it just goes on and
on.”
Unbelievably this
is from the same radio show as the Maggie Gee quote -
surely an all-time low for BBC arts coverage. In order
to make his lamentable death of Little Else gag, Dallat
has made things up about the book. Anthropology contains
the playful phrase little else twice (in the stories Sleeping
and Schnauzer). Twice does not constitute again and again.
Nor do these two instances of the phrase just go on and
on. It is also interesting to note that none of the phrases
that Dallat ‘quotes’ are in the book. He simply
made them up. Who is Cahal Dallat anyway, and why was
he allowed on the radio? |
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Chris
Roberts – Uncut, on Timoleon Vieta Come Home.
“This clumsily-titled
novel has spells of grace and flashes of genius, but
doesn’t induce the hoped for hoped-for throes of
ecstasy. Timoleon Vieta is a dog, and stories about
dogs bore the tail off you if you’re no dog lover.
If he’d written about cats we’d be tipping
him for Pulitzers. He’s gifted, quick-witted but
dancing to alien rhythms here.”
When good fans turn bad...
Here former Rhodes champion Chris Roberts damns the
author with faint praise in a three star review. He
appears to have made the mistake of thinking that the
book is about a dog. It isn’t – it’s
about people. And as for dancing to alien rhythms, Roberts
appears to have forgotten the time he quit journalism
to become a pop star with his band Catwalk. Look them
up in your Guinness Book of Hit Singles - not a sausage.
Still, at least he had a go.
Unfortunately, for legal reasons we have only been able
to include public anti-Rhodes rantings. This means that
we are unable to transcribe Rhodes’ favourite rejection
letter (from the London Magazine, to whom he had sent
a few of the stories that subsequently appeared in Anthropology.
Ever supportive of new and innovative writers, the magazine
replied thus: “These really don’t amount to
stories in our view. There simply isn’t anything
to arouse the reader’s interest. With best wishes,
Jane Rye.”), which is a great loss to this site.
The last word must surely go to the Reader from Marysville,
Washington who wrote on Amazon.com that, "After
reading this book I stuffed it in the toilet then tore
it into pieces."
How very unhygienic.
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