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Friday 5 December 2008

Deaf Sentence

The last laugh

Caroline Moore on the new novel by David Lodge

‘Sex had become an object of anxious rather than pleasurable anticipation’; and, Desmond asks, ‘what will I have to live for, when social and sexual intercourse are effectively at an end?’

The only structure in Desmond’s life is provided by his ‘duty visits’ every four weeks to check on his 89-year-old father — an ex-dance musician living alone in the London suburbs in conditions of ever-increasing squalor. The old man is stripped of all his old life-enhancing interests: ‘He has only one hobby these days: saving money, observing prices, economising on food, clothing and household bills’.

Such a synopsis makes this novel sound unrelentingly glum, though it is actually extremely readable. It is deeply embedded in the mundane, without becoming dull; and, at the end, when death strikes (as every reader knows it will, from the title alone), it becomes deeply moving. The descriptions of bereavement read like only thinly-veiled autobiography; and their fine, understated, unsentimental honesty is quite extraordinarily good at evoking the painful ordinariness of grief.

The sections which seem most obviously fictional, and which give the novel its nearest approach to a plot, are altogether flimsier, though entertaining enough. The main scenario (though emotionally this is a mere sub-plot) involves Desmond with the young woman, Alex Loom, whose cleavage he is involuntarily inspecting in the opening paragraph. She is a graduate writing a thesis on the language of suicide notes, which is thematically convenient; and rapidly reveals herself to be manipulative and unstable, and to have designs, of a sort, on Desmond. But the levels of suspense are mild, since one never believes that Desmond is threatened with anything more than humiliation — and a drip of small indignities is already his daily lot.

In its primary plot, the novel suffers from low narrative drive, for which there is no pill available on the internet: one feels the author has his own version of Desmond’s query, ‘what shall I do with my characters today?’

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