Review: 'This is Life' by Dan Rhodes

Dan Rhodes books make me happy. They are full of quirky people falling in love with other quirky people in unlikely, serendipitous circumstances. There's a gentleness and a direct soft humour to his stories, usually with a hint of melancholy. I find I have to make certain allowances if I'm to enjoy them; the writing style is simple and mundane, and some people might find the world of Dan Rhodes a little saccharine and sentimental and unlikely, but by the end of his books, I always feel warmly satisfied. 

I read 'This is LIfe', expecting a light jaunty read and that's what I got. The main character is Aurélie, an art student studying in Paris. For an art project she throws a stone in the air in a busy street and it lands on a baby in a pram. The mother of this baby is furious and in a moment of strange revenge, insists that Aurélie must look after the baby for a week. The book covers the duration of this week, in which Aurélie comes across various interesting people including the Akiyamas, a Japanese couple on holiday being shown around Paris by Aurélie's best friend, Sylvie, and a world-famous performance artist, known as 'Le Machine'. Le Machine is in Paris performing a show called 'Life' in which he lives naked on a stage for 12 weeks and displays everything his body produces during that time in glass jars.

The portrayal of the pretentious artist seems to begin as a parody but ends as something with real meaning. Dan Rhodes wants you to see the beauty in life. This book is an elaborate construction with that design in mind; all the frivolous characters and their unlikely adventures are really impelled forward purely by this drive to exhibit a manifestation of the true meaning of life. This is, after all, what novels do best, because you can show life in all its slow-motion details, then leave the reader at the end with an appreciation of the whole, all those words, all those details, closed and concluded: a rounded message for what it's worth, a facsimile of death.

(More on this book at Pixelled Wheels Clunk Up Hills.)