Book Review

The gloom and hope of life

Deaf Sentence

David Lodge's new novel opens with the nose of a retired professor of linguistics, Desmond Bates, hovering a few inches above the breasts of a young woman, as he desperately tries to catch what she is saying amid the din of a drinks reception. "Yes," he assures her. "Absolutely." She nods with satisfaction, shakes his hand, and turns to go. We know that Desmond's hearing difficulties are going to get him into some sort of a scrape with a girl.

Lodge makes deft use of the comic potential of deafness in a string of further episodes, as Desmond opts for either nodding and grinning hopefully or talking non-stop, lurching from gormlessness to rudeness, and reflecting ruefully on the peculiar lack of nobility that attaches itself to encroaching deafness. It's hard to think of another serious disability that can always be relied upon to raise a smile. Desmond's deafness is a source of mild satisfaction to his father, nearly 90. "You are bit Mutt and Jeff, aren't you, son? At your age I had perfect hearing." But Winifred, his brisk and capable wife whose interior design business in the city centre is taking off, is exasperated, as her nuanced way with the word "Darling" is starting to indicate. As the people around him seem to grow more irritated and distant, Desmond becomes increasingly fed up and depressed.

Lodge's previous work of fiction was his most ambitious and his unluckiest. Author, Author took him three years to write, and he disciplined himself to produce an extraordinary novel that was not only based on the life of Henry James but captured the spidery narrative crawl and suppressed emotion of a Jamesian original. Maddeningly, Colm Tóibín's own "Henry James novel", The Master, was published a month or two earlier and was promptly shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Lodge's book was left marooned, and was soon shrouded in a faint air of embarrassment. The impression over the first half of Deaf Sentence is that Lodge, perhaps a little bruised, has decided to be easier on himself this time round. The narrator's voice is one familiar from many of Lodge's novels, insinuating itself with the reader, cheerfully dignifying our self-pity and sense that lesser people are winning a disproportionate number of life's prizes. Like many of Lodge's characters, Desmond is just off the pace, self-deprecating in a self-assured sort of way, a tiny bit envious of more socially adept colleagues who seem to have got further with fewer brains.

There are some familiar Lodgey scenes and wheezes, a comic pants-wetting episode, mildly saucy conjugal romps, some playing about with characters' names and switches of narrative voice from first to third person. There are bite-sized chunks of meaty academic material served with lashings of gravy, and easy to swallow introductions to earpiece technology, lip-reading techniques and the effect of the Lombard Reflex. And some half-familiar characters appear: the dangerously unhinged blonde, the smooth, nakedly ambitious young college professor with feet of clay. Regular Lodge fans who found themselves respectfully impressed but left slightly cold by the great technical accomplishments of Author, Author get their money's worth here.

But, almost without us noticing, this revelatory novel craftily deepens and darkens. What at first seems a cosy, ever-so-slightly lazy entertainment, a paper-thin post-campus romantic comedy padded out with well-polished observational comedy about deafness from Lodge's desk drawer, gradually lures the reader into a space where contemporary fiction rarely braves to go. A hastily arranged British Council lecture tour takes Desmond to Poland, and on his last afternoon he hires a taxi to take him to Auschwitz. News comes that his father, Harry, a rubbery old crooner and dance-band musician, has suffered a stroke, and is hooked up to a life-support machine. This brings back memories of the death of Desmond's first wife, Maisie, who had been painfully sick for several months before her death with cancer. Yet magically, even as it becomes transformed, the novel holds its note. Lodge's meditation on loss, on suicide, on death and dying, and how we can help each other through these things, is humble, tender, intelligent, honest, unpretentious and unpreachy.

Catholicism blows in and out of most of Lodge's novels. In Deaf Sentence Winifred is a cradle Catholic whose recovery of her faith in her fifties is a source of baffled speculation by Desmond, who, like his father, has never been one for churchgoing and thinks of himself as a humanist. Lodge, too, is a cradle Catholic, though unlike Winifred he remains on the edges of the Church, too intellectually scrupulous perhaps to be sucked back in, too intrigued to leave. I imagine him subscribing to The Tablet but only looking at it occasionally. But Lodge's temperament, his angle of vision, is distinctly, persistently Catholic. Superficially, there's the sex, never insignificant or uncomplicated in his books, and an abiding source of fascination and unease. But more deeply there always seems to be in Lodge's narrative voice the Augustinian sense that life is both more gloomy and more hopeful than it looks from a flat, meritocratic, bourgeois perspective. The standard contemporary novel, whatever its point of departure, tends to find its resolution in a moment of discovery, triumph or revenge. The revelatory moment in Lodge's stories is less tidy, and is as likely to be the hero's realisation of their brokenness, a recognition of their need for help, for love, as a simple moment of victory, the bagging of a girl or a top job in the university.

In Lodge's world, imperfect, unfinished people grapple with resentments and jealousies and weaknesses, loving each other and forgiving each other as best they can, and - as we see beautifully described in this fine novel - staying with each other to the end.

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