A hugely entertaining and often
deeply emotional account of a deaf man's journey from
normality to a kind of insanity.
DEAF SENTENCE
David Lodge
Harvill Secker, pbk, $37
Review by Ian Williams
David Lodge has been described as having the ability to
attract a curious but mostly non-academic audience into the
inner world of the academic elite, resulting in fame and
recognition throughout the English-speaking world.
His latest novel, which reads like a memoir, will add to that
fame, but perhaps in a perverse fashion.
For it concerns Desmond, a retired head of department
linguistics professor who, because of deafness, now fills his
time being a sort of adjunct to Winifred, nicknamed Fred, his
second and younger wife.
Fred has bloomed personally and professionally since she
opened a furnishing store, leaving Des to do the shopping -
his deaf sentence.
Lodge, in real life a former university professor who
developed a hearing problem, has created a multi-layered
character embedded in a social environment from which,
because of his disability, he feels increasingly alienated.
Hopefully, readers will find these passages interesting, but
for those who do not, Deaf Sentence still has lots to
offer.
The relationships between extended family members get a
regular airing, as do Des' Roman Catholic working-class
roots.
His late wife Maisie was not top drawer.
Neither is his 89-year-old father, who made a living playing
in a dance band, but who now lives in squalor in the old
family semi.
Further complications arise in the form of a 27-year-old
mature student from America, who wants to lure Des out of
retirement to oversee her thesis; and to smack her bottom be
he so inclined.
No wonder I was glued to the page.
As Lodge, I mean Des, tells it, blindness is tragic but
deafness comic.
The blind, with their seeing-eye dogs, elicit immediate
sympathy.
But hearing-aid wearers, often mishearing what people say,
leave people baffled and impatient.
No wonder even the well-mannered Fred loses her sang-froid
now and then.
All in all, Deaf Sentence is something of an enigma -
a plea for understanding which may fall on deaf ears.
Life is ruled by the need to insert and remove hearing aids,
and being sure to carry a supply of fresh batteries in order
to be human.
It is a hugely entertaining, subtly funny, and often deeply
emotional account of a man's journey from normality to a kind
of insanity.
- Ian Williams is a Dunedin writer.
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