Oliver Marre

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.

issue 27 February 2010

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’.

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