KEY POINTS:
The pun in the title of David Lodge's latest novel is sustained throughout and you gradually come to the conclusion that it is as much about death as deafness. Yet on the way to a conclusion which signifies the retreat from social life of the ageing main character are some very funny, laugh-out-loud scenes.
Lodge's realism has, over the years, mostly kept tabs on life in his time at his place and now that he is approaching 65, perhaps, like Philip Roth, he will plot the flight path of everyman - well, every upper middle class man - in life's final approach to journey's end. As people live longer, this may well become a new genre, the genre of staying alive, but only just.
Whatever the future brings from Lodge, this is so deft a novel, so deeply interesting in its portrayal of Desmond Bates, the central character, and of his wife and family, including a father slipping into dementia, that readers can only hope he keeps telling his stories as long as he is around.
Bates is a retired professor of linguistics at a university in the north of England, whose hearing has gradually become impaired. He hates retirement, in which he has degenerated into the role of house-husband, while his second wife enjoys the excitement of a flourishing business. His deafness, despite aids, limits his ability to start anew in any kind of intellectually stimulating activity, and his attitude towards coping with his problem is curmudgeonly rather than constructive. In a sad but funny opening, Lodge writes:
"Deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic ... One of the strongest curses in the English language is 'damn your eyes!' Try it next time with 'damn your ears!' Doesn't cut it. Or imagine if the poet had written, 'drink to me only with thine ears.' It's actually no more illogical." Poetical, he decides, "ears" isn't.
The funniest scene portrays him at a party without batteries for his hearing-aids. Whenever anyone approaches him for conversation, to avoid having to listen and probably misinterpret anything they may say, he drowns them out with a harangue about what he presumes is their favourite subject. That presumption is misplaced enough for him to destroy the party.
At another hilarious time, he simply responds to what he thinks people are saying, and gets that mostly wrong too. The story ends with Bates, far from triumphing against the odds, sitting quietly at a lip-reading class from whose members he gets the consolation of being among fellow sufferers and from whom he faces no challenges to his fading ego.
This is an easy and edifying read, adjectives you can't often enough put against the same novel.
Deaf Sentence
By David Lodge (Harvill Secker $37)
* Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer.
