Little Hands Clapping by Dan Rhodes

Dan Rhodes's novel about a museum dedicated to suicide is by turns witty and gruesome, says Alice Fisher
Dan Rhodes
Dan Rhodes finds humanity in the horror in his latest novel, Little Hands Clapping. Photograph: Dorota Gaszcczak Dorota Gaszcczak/Public Domain

From its opening scene, in which a grey old man lies in bed, eats a spider and listens as a woman hangs herself downstairs, Dan Rhodes's new novel packs a gleefully nasty punch. The story is mainly set in a German museum dedicated to the act of suicide. Created by a well-meaning woman seeking to cure visitors of self-destructive thoughts, it has, instead, become a home for all sorts of sinister characters: a dangerously apathetic caretaker; a cleaner and child-abuse survivor who believes she is damned to hell; various Europeans wanting to end their lives; and a psychopathic doctor named Ernest Fröhlicher. Its latest visitor is Madalena, a Portuguese student, who, unable to handle the loss of her childhood sweetheart, embarks on a despairing journey to kill herself in its rooms.

Sounds pretty bleak, doesn't it? But in Dan Rhodes's skilful hands, this tale becomes more Brothers Grimm than just plain grim. The sense that this is a fairy story, with all the implications of a moral message and an investigation of human nature that come with it, runs through the book and is heightened by its title. The phrase comes from a passage about the museum's founder, who grew up in Hamelin, famous for losing its children to the Pied Piper. Rhodes says the inhabitants can't forget the image of the children "being so happy one minute, their little hands clapping and their little tongues chattering, and so frightened and confused the next". The description could apply to many of the good people to whom bad things happen in this story.

Rhodes was included in Granta's Best of Young British Novelists list in 2003 after the publication of his best-known early works, Timoleon Vieta Come Home and Anthropology, and this new novel comes good on that promise. His gentle yet clever telling of the monstrous events at the museum finds humanity in the horror and makes his characters' unpleasant antics seem almost whimsical.

Sometimes, his deceptively simple writing does allow you to hold the characters at arm's length: I shut the book one night and had to remind myself that I'd just read about a dog eating a penis and how disgusting it was; the incident was written in such a light, amusing way I had to concentrate on feeling appalled.

But overall, Madalena's affecting story keeps the plot cantering along and things come to a very satisfying conclusion involving, as in all good fairy stories, comeuppance and carnage meted out to all the right people. After reading Rhodes's book, many little hands should be clapping very loudly indeed.