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Deaf Sentence

The last laugh

David Lodge
Harvill Secker, 294pp, £17.99,

Philip Hensher

Wednesday, 30th April 2008

Caroline Moore on the new novel by David Lodge

David Lodge’s writing career spans nearly 50 years. Coincidentally, my son was reading (and hugely enjoying) How Far Can You Go? when Deaf Sentence arrived for review: it seemed generationally fitting that the teenager should be reading about sex and religion, and his mother a novel about deafness, death, erectile dysfunction and the search for a care home that does not smell of ‘urine nauseatingly mixed with air-freshener’.

In the opening sentence, the hero of Deaf Sentence is described at a party:

The tall, bespectacled, grey-haired man standing at the edge of the throng on the main room of the gallery, stooping very close to the young woman in the red silk blouse, his head lowered and angled away from her face, nodding sagely and emitting a phatic murmur from time to time, is not as you might think an off-duty priest whom she has persuaded to hear her confession . . . nor has he adopted this posture the better to look down the front of her blouse, though this is an accidental bonus of his situation, the only one in fact.

In fact, Desmond Bates is deaf —

not profoundly deaf, but deaf enough to make communication imperfect in most social situations and impossible in some, such as this one.

Deafness has prompted Desmond to take early retirement from his university job as Professor of Linguistics; and his life is now dismayingly empty. He has lost his appetite for research, and ‘the question: what shall I do with myself today?’ confronts him every morning.

He feels increasingly marginalised in his marriage. His second wife, Winifred (or Fred) is eight years younger than him — ‘not quite January and May — more like March and April’. But the gap is yawning wider in his apprehensions, as Fred has recently acquired a ‘rejuvenating career’, and a rejuvenated figure. Desmond now finds himself trailing along behind her at social occasions with ‘a vague unfocussed smile on his face’, like the gaffe-prone consort of a female monarch.

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