Features

  Dan Rhodes has always loved offbeat museums. His favourite in Scotland, where he lives with his wife and two-year-old son, is the Giant Angus MacAskill Museum on the Isle of Skye, dedicated to a 7ft 8in man who toured America and became a star on the freakshow circuit. He’s heard rumours of a touring Museum of Broken Hearts which, he says wistfully, he’d really like to visit. 

Our reason for discussing such things is Rhodes’s macabre but hilarious new novel, Little Hands Clapping. It’s about a German suicide museum which, while conceived as a deterrent, nevertheless exerts a magnetic pull on those poor souls who can bear the world no more. Many even find it a congenial place to perform the act. 

Now 37, Rhodes started the novel 15 years ago. ‘For about 12 years I was just making notes,’ he says. ‘Then I did three years of proper donkey work. Originally I wanted it to be quite a serious psychological horror novel, but I couldn’t resist putting gags in.’ Did he worry people would think a funny book about suicide was in bad taste? ‘I did, and it does deal with some pretty bleak and harrowing subject matter. But if I’d worried too much about that I would have let the subject down, because life isn’t really like that. Nor is death, for that matter.’ 

In any case, the suicide sections are offset by pure character comedy and the sort of sincere love story that’s formed the basis of Rhodes’s previous books, such as Gold and Timoleon Vieta Come Home. In places it reads like Gabriel Garcia Márquez. (Rhodes has a gift for parody.) 

‘I completely love Márquez,’ Rhodes admits. ‘I got into him because people were reading my stuff and saying, “Aha! You read Márquez, don’t you?” And I hadn’t at that point. So I went away and read him and he’s now one of my favourite writers. I suppose he, too, likes classical love stories with slightly unusual things going on, so I’m happy for people to make the comparison.’ He pauses. ‘It’s a bit like Steps and Abba, isn’t it?’ 

Download an extract from Little Hands Clapping here

Further reading...

Little Hands Clapping
by Dan Rhodes
Canongate
Buy now