Timoleon Vieta Come Home Dan Rhodes Canongate, 226pp, £9.99 ISBN 184195389X

Cockroft is an ageing gay musician, a former "bandleader and bon viveur" who wrote some hit TV themes long ago but disgraced himself on a chat show in 1974 by making a drunken "Enoch was right" rant - not out of any real racist conviction but out of annoyance at being cruelly dumped by a Moroccan businessman. He hasn't worked since, and has "lost track of how many hours in his life he had spent contemplating suicide".

Now he lives, supported by lingering royalties and investments, in an Umbrian farmhouse. Most of his neighbours are other English expats. They keep writing "how-we-did-up-our-house" books with titles like Olive Oil and Sunset: an Umbrian odyssey. Cockroft does not have much to do with these people and his life is pretty lonely. There are transitory boyfriends, but his only constant companion is his dog, Timoleon Vieta.

Dan Rhodes lets us know straight away that Timoleon Vieta is a mongrel with a coat "of various, apparently random lengths"; that is to say, we are in for a shaggy-dog story.

When Cockroft goes on drinking sprees in Florence, Assisi and such places, he tends to invite young men to stay. As a rule, they do not take up the offer, but one evening a handsome twentysomething appears at the house, armed with Cockroft's card and claiming to be a Bosnian refugee. Cockroft doesn't remember him, but this is hardly surprising: those "weekends away" always dissolve in an alcoholic blur.

The "Bosnian", whose accent is fake and who is no more Bosnian than Cockroft, makes himself useful doing odd jobs like fixing the gutter. Cockroft is captivated. He sees a hot-air balloon that seems to symbolise his new-found happiness. "He imagined he was in the basket with the Bosnian . . . The Bosnian was holding him tight in his strong arms . . ." Just then the balloon blows a panel, the basket tips and the passengers fatally tumble out. "'Oh dear,' said Cockroft."

This comic omen underlines the two major problems that threaten the idyllic prospect Cockroft has in mind. First, the "Bosnian" is straight, and second, Timoleon Vieta, not such a fool as his master, reacts to the "Bosnian" with snarls and bites. Cockroft has never seen the dog so hostile. Absurdly he thinks: "It's as if we're drifting apart. Sometimes I wonder whether I really know him any more." The "Bosnian" refuses to stay unless the dog goes, so the idiotic Cockroft drives Timoleon Vieta to Rome and abandons him in the street.

Rhodes, although one of the Granta Best of Young British Novelists and an acclaimed short story writer, has perhaps not mastered the novel form altogether, and the second half of the book is a series of fairly picaresque anecdotes about people who encounter Timoleon Vieta, however tangentially, during the dog's long walk home.

There's a soft-hearted policeman; a Welsh tourist disappointed in love, to whose jaundiced eye the Trevi Fountain looks "like something from the outside part of Homebase, only bigger" and the Pantheon like a gasworks; a professor of Sinology whose life story, along with those of his Chinese wife and stepdaughter, are included in full on the grounds that Timoleon Vieta happens to stray past the churchyard while the professor's funeral is in progress; a severely retarded teenage girl dying of pneumonia as Timoleon Vieta passes her house; and the Cambodian sister-in-law of a holidaying French dentist who gives Timoleon Vieta a biscuit.

The all but total irrelevance of these stories is shown off proudly, in keeping with Rhodes's sense of humour. Meanwhile, we can predict that the shaggy dog will never quite make it home and that Rhodes will contrive a nasty little twist at the end, as is indeed the case. The twist is a bit misjudged and immature but arguably Rhodes has enough flair to get away with it. Already a talked-about author, he is likely to be more so in future.

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