The Calvert Recorder
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
By Viki Volk
Staff Writer

There’s still time to cram a final piece of fiction into the last fleeting days of summer with a delightful novel of manners – and who would have thought such a delicacy was still being written and from just down the road.

The 263-page novel is also part travelogue through ancient China and Rome and comes from the pen of first-time novelist and St. Leonard resident Don Phillips.

It is perhaps an obvious dual genre from a former trade negotiator with the Executive Office of the President. In 20 years of worldwide travels it is likely Phillips saw and performed a great deal of the elaborate gestures and honorifics required in the handling of international trade agreements. Perhaps not, however, quite as demanding as the Chinese ceremony that conveyed upon the heroine of the book, named both Xiao Ji Long and Tutu, the honorific, Abundant Talents of Unusual Degree.

The manners and intrigues Phillips elaborates in “I Tutus, The Son of Heaven,” are from the earliest centuries of modern time in China and in Rome. And while so far this could pass as a reasonably traditional comedy of manners backed by a good study of history, there are a few less typical elements.

The heroin, for example, is a dog, a pug, to be specific. “[A] female pug – an ancient breed of Chinese origin believed to date at least as far back as 400 B.C.E,” Phillips writes in his introduction, which is itself another contrivance.

The entire experience of Tutus – known in the first half of the book by her Chinese name Xiao Ji Long – is told as the experience of “Professor Sunny Dayberry, Visiting Scholar, Department of Anthropology, Patuxent State College, St. Leonard’s on-the-Cove, Md.” Professor Dayberry, in a five-page foreword, prepares the reader for his channeling experiences that provided the story of a pug conveyed from the palace of the Chinese emperor through an ignoble transport across what would come to be known as the Silk Road and into the hands of a merchant family of Rome.

In the words of the http://www.itutus.com Website, “A bungling anthropologist accidentally transports himself back 2,000 years into the consciousness of a Chinese pug, entering into the captivating world of… I, Tutus , a dazzlingly original ‘bottom-up’ view of the age-old drama of man and dog.“

As contrived and convoluted as the premise, the portraying of a society through the eyes – and the nose, ears and instincts – of a dog provides a remarkably broad reportage style.

For example, how better to explain the supplication of the masses before the Emperor than “inhaling everywhere scents of compressed anger and cringing fear.”

In the universal role of innocent, the small, young pug is easily amusing offering the naïve and non-judgmental foil to the jaded eunuchs and concubines who pet, pamper and provide the storyline for “I Tutus.”

And Phillips put the pug through his paces. “Tutus explores the fundaments of the human and canine condition – birth, sex, violence, philosophy, love, housebreaking, heartbreak, religion, and politics,” continues the Website.

And, of course, a new view of history imbibed with a sly humor. The names alone are enough to draw a smile. There are Ministers of the Multitudes, a Hall of Celestial Purity, Park of Verdant Radiance, the Duke of Tranquility and the lovely litany of concubines beginning with Splendid Moon, Lovely Jade, Snowy Jade, Adorable Jade, Lotus Blossom, Floating Petal, Blossoming Spring, Enchanting Fragrance, Golden Bracelet, Swaying Oriole and Precious Wisdom.

“It started as a whimsical idea,” Phillips said last week from his St. Leonard home. At the time he only had one pug – today the family boasts two – and started “bantering with my wife” about the breed that is older than modern time. The breed was first recorded in 400 B.C., Phillips said.

It was about the time of the millennium when he first began forming the whimsical idea into the trappings of a novel. “It put in my head [what was happening] 2000 years ago.”

During his years as a trade negotiator he visited both China and Rome, but he also read a great deal and researched the times of the book he began to write.

Soon his research and jottings “ballooned into a full-blow novel.”

Phillips said he tried writing a novel in the early 1980s, “but I didn’t feel that good about it. And my wife didn’t like the novel. She thought it was lousy.”

By then the job was rolling and it was “a pretty pressured job,” Phillips said and the idea of a novel was put off until his retirement. Then when he started I, “I stuck to it. I generally wrote a bit every morning. It wasn’t too rigid,” he said.

He returned to trade negotiating on a consulting basis which slowed up the book’s production but in August he signed a contract with Public America. “It’s not self-published,” he said.

His payment is in royalties, so he’s trying to sell them in a variety of ways, including from his Website.

Woodburns in Solomons also carries copies and he has a book signing planed for Oct. 1, 2005 at DiGiovanni’s on Solomons from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.

Phillips is planning to continue with the saga based upon the final page of his first book. “To be continued,” the book concludes “in ‘I, Tutus: Citizen of Rome.”

In the meantime, Phillips is pushing his first work. With a publisher putting up the publication costs and his wife liking this one he sounded confident about recommending it.

“You’re going to love it,” he said. “I hope.”

E-mail Viki Volk at vvolk@somdnews.com.