Timoleon Vieta Come Home: A Sentimental Journey, by Dan Rhodes. London: Cannongate Books, 2003

Kim Hicks

In her introduction to the Wells & Jeffers (1995) adaptation of Eric Knight's 1938 classic, Lassie Come-Home, Wells writes that Lassie “is not a 'boy and his dog story' at all...It is about being forced to make a choice between having something to eat and keeping something you love.” Wells raises an issue central to fictions that feature nonhuman animals: To what extent can a novel truly be about a nonhuman character? Too often, animals become a device to get at the “real” story, the significance of their own experiences minimized or negated in the process. In a novel concerned with the painful choices love entails, Rhodes addresses this problem in an original and ultimately moving way.

The novel is divided into two parts, defined by the changing fortunes of Timoleon Vieta, “the finest breed of dog: a mongrel.” In the opening chapters, he is at home with Carthusians Cockroft, an elderly British composer living in Umbria. Cockroft is an almost entirely unsympathetic character, a self-pitying, self-deceiving man who carelessly has thrown away his talent and his reputation.
Younger men enter and exit Cockroft's life, but Timoleon Vieta is his only lasting companion. Although the dog “becomes the center of Cockroft's world, and is lavished with food, comfort, attention and love,” Cockroft, nevertheless, is willing to drive Timoleon to Rome and abandon him at the behest of his latest lover, a surly young man identified only as “the Bosnian.”
The novel's second half follows Timoleon as he travels the Italian countryside in search of his lost home, wanderings that serve as pretext for a series of vignettes about people encountered along his way. Each vignette takes as its title names bestowed upon Timoleon: He is “Teg” to an English girl jilted by her Italian boyfriend; “Dusty” to a father presiding over the slow death of his beloved daughter; “Giuseppe, or Leonardo Da Vinci,” to a pair of doomed lovers. Committed to a man unworthy of his devotion, Timoleon moves into and out of these tales of tragic love, the unifying link that makes Rhodes's book a novel rather than a collection of short stories.

This foregrounding of human stories might seem to come at Timoleon's expense. Instead, Rhodes's choice makes the dog's experience the novel's central metaphor without making him the focus of the book, a practice that runs the risk of anthropomorphizing its subject. The book does not attempt to enter into Timoleon's consciousness; instead, it generalizes his experience of being homeless and of loving unwisely. That the novel's human characters are unable to see the connection between their experiences and Timoleon's state gives the metaphor added power and poignancy.

Thus, although Timoleon's consciousness is not at the forefront of the text, Timoleon Vieta is a dog's story--a “shaggy dog” story, in fact, because Timoleon's journey ends where it began and achieves nothing. None of the characters seem to have been changed by their contacts with the dog, least of all Cockcroft; at the novel's end, he takes in yet another homeless young man who, undoubtedly, will betray him. The only reunion granted Timoleon is a final meeting with the Bosnian who originally set him on his way--a punchline to Rhodes’ existential joke. Rhodes risks alienating readers with the resolution (or non-resolution) of Timoleon's story. Still, the risk must be run if the novel is going to remain true to its own underlying premise.

Shaggy dog stories rarely have a point; if they do, it's a point that negates readers’ expectations. By their form, these stories insist that the storyteller's virtuosity is more important than the audience’s desire for closure. In this way, shaggy dog stories help readers recognize that expecting characters to get what they deserve is rooted in an experience of narrative, not in an experience of reality. In this sense, shaggy dog stories are more realistic by far than are narratives with neat resolutions.
Timoleon's journey thus suggests something essential about the nature of life, love, and the consolations of fiction. In the manner of Lassie Come-Home, Timoleon's travels and his unswerving devotion illuminate human life; his journey's end, however, frustrates readers' expectations. The same might be said of all the lovers whose lives intersect, however briefly, with Timoleon’s. In this novel, happy endings are in painfully short supply, although a moral is implied: Life is unpredictable; love is fragile; and, in the end, we all are one meal away from being strays. Nevertheless, we carry on. With its devotion to this dog's-eye view of reality, Timoleon Vieta Come Home challenges readers to value love, even in a world where love--in its various manifestations--is constantly de-valued in the most cruel and random ways.

Note

* Kim Hicks , Holyoke Community College



Reference
Wells, R., & Jeffers, S. (1995). Lassie come-home: Eric Knight’s original 1938 classic. [adaptation]. Henry Holt & Co., Inc: New York.

 

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