Book Reviews - Review 284

David Lodge started losing his hearing in his mid-40s, and by the start of his 70s, his affliction was beginning to detract significantly from his quality of life. Ever a resourceful writer, Lodge drew on his experience for this novel, which describes the daily ordeals of Desmond Bates, a retired Professor of Linguistics whose progressive loss of high-frequency hearing makes communication, and therefore living, increasingly difficult for both himself and those around him.

Lodge makes good use of the many opportunities for melancholy humour offered by the mishearings of his protagonist - particularly at social gatherings, which the constant background noise makes an ordeal rather than a source of pleasure; and by the endless fight with his hearing aid, which has a habit of packing in at inopportune moments, or being left elsewhere when he most needs it.

Being deaf is not in itself a story, so Lodge had to invent an episode in the life of Bates to provide dramatic momentum, and to justify Bates' decision to keep a diary, whose contents make up the book. At a party, Bates' hearing aid fails, and he finds himself in embarrassed conversation with an attractive young woman whose utterances he is forced to pretend to understand; in fact, he inadvertently agrees to help her with her linguistics thesis. The woman, Alex Loom, turns out to be an American with serious emotional problems and masochistic tendencies, who attempts to manipulate Bates into a compromising relationship. Bates twigs just in time what she is up to, and the underlying thread of the novel involves an interesting game of cat-and-mouse between the two characters. Tension is provided by Bates' acknowledgement that his motives in agreeing, initially, to meet Loom at her flat, were not devoid of elements of vanity and lust.

The other main thread of the story involves Bates' dealings with his elderly father, who lives alone halfway across the country and whose incipient dementia provides the narrator's life with an additional source of stress.

Deaf Sentence is as readable as any of Lodge's novels, but it lacks the polish of his best work. Much of the plot seems to be assembled skillfully from material he had to hand, from both his life and his reading, but there is no real thematic unity between the novel's strands. Of course, a deaf Professor of Linguistics is bound to be interested in the implications of his misunderstandings of spoken language; but Lodge doesn't try to establish any profound philosophical connections between language itself, and our ability or inability to communicate with it. Also, as the novel's punning title suggests, contemplation of death figures prominently, but it isn't integrated very deeply with the novel's other themes.

Lodge's prose is, as ever, flowing and lively, but only in a few passages does it sparkle as it used to in his earlier fiction. One feels, sometimes, that he digs exactly as deep as he needs to in his observations of modern society, and in his creation of characters, but rarely much deeper.

This isn't a particularly ambitious novel, though, and one must mark it a success on its own terms. Lodge is not a writer of great passion or intensity, but his ability to combine intelligence with humour and lightness of touch is always engaging. However potentially depressing his books' subject matter, they are always humane and cheerful in tone.