Ageing mirthlessly

"What a terrible title!" may be your first response, as it was mine, to David Lodge's new novel. But hang on a minute: it's better than you think. Obviously enough, a pun is being perpetrated. The first word of the phrase "death sentence" has been mispelled—or misheard—to create another phrase, "deaf sentence." This slippage suggests two things: that going deaf is a bit like being handed a punishment; and that deafness has something in common with death. But the title's punning possibilities don't end there. The word "sentence" could be taken in its linguistic, not juridical, sense. In which case, a different set of questions would be confronting us, to do with the relationship between deafness and language.

The hard-of-hearing person in question is Desmond Bates, a retired professor of linguistics in his mid-sixties who lives in an unnamed northern city. We first encounter him at a party in an art gallery, stooping and straining to hear what is being said by the pretty young blonde who has struck up a conversation with him. It's a forlorn battle: she talks, he feigns fascination ("Very interesting," "Yes," "Absolutely"), and he emerges from their 15-minute "conversation" none the wiser as to what it was about. This kind of experience has become depressingly common for Desmond. Half the time he has no idea what people are saying to him; and even when he thinks he knows, he usually gets some crucial word wrong. Language, in its spoken aspect, has become an instrument of proliferating and ever more imprecise meanings—a disconcerting experience for a professor of linguistics. Desmond's wife, Winifred (whom he calls "Fred"), is a brisk businesswoman in charge of a thriving interior design business. On the whole, she bears her husband's failing hearing with good grace, but he suspects—not without reason—that her tolerance has a limit.

Desmond's sense of being shut out from the world of speech has led him to start a journal—it is this that we are reading—in which he devotes considerable space to the status of deafness, both in literature and life. "Deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic," he notes. Lodge is a novelist whose reputation rests largely on his comic abilities. So one might expect him to wring quite a few laughs from Desmond's plight. But one of the ironies of Deaf Sentence is that while it features, from its title onwards, plenty of jokes and puns (and even, in classic David Lodge mode, a saucy scene in a sauna), it contains almost no comedy. This is surely deliberate. The people who find the deaf comic tend to be those who aren't themselves hard of hearing; and jokes are only funny when they don't have to be repeated. One of Desmond's defining characteristics is his stubborn refusal to be amused, either by his own poor hearing or by anything else. But then he is a dry-as-dust linguistics professor; and besides, he has a much more serious subject than his own deafness to contemplate.

That other subject is, of course, death, and it has been on Desmond's mind for some time now. His first wife, Maisie, died of cancer many years ago. His father, in his late eighties, lives on his own in a filthy house in south London, and clearly doesn't have long left. Desmond himself, having taken early retirement from the university, feels increasingly frail and superfluous. His libido is diminishing and his general lack of activity contrasts embarrassingly with his wife's busyness; when he accompanies her to social events these days, he feels "like a royal consort escorting a female monarch." Moreover, he has a new problem on his hands. Largely as a consequence of his failure to hear what she was saying, he finds himself being dragged into a friendship of sorts with the blonde from the party. She turns out to be an American linguist named Alex Loom who is conducting postgrad research into the "stylistics of suicide notes," and she wants Desmond to be her supervisor. But, as he discovers when he returns from meeting her to find a pair of knickers in his coat pocket, his insights into the linguistics of death are not the only thing about him that she finds appealing.

Deaf Sentence would run the risk of being an intolerably grim novel were it not for one thing: Desmond's fascination with literature and language, which the deterioration of his aural faculties has, thankfully, not impaired. This fascination (which is shared by his creator, another retired professor), acts not so much as an antidote to the novel's other preoccupations as a kind of ironic filtering device, a way of bringing some measure of logic and clarity to the troubling material of Desmond's life. Things in general may be confusing and depressing; but at least one can carry on thinking (and writing) about words and what they mean. Deaf Sentence certainly offers many satisfactions along these lines. It is infused by a kind of heightened linguistic self-consciousness, so that language is continually dissected and discussed, and no opportunity is lost to set little verbal puzzles (not least among them being the names of the characters). This self-consciousness is, of course, a product of Desmond's deafness as well as of his professional background; one of the paradoxical results of not being able to hear properly is that it makes you more, rather than less, aware of language, of just how slippery and ambiguous it is. In Deaf Sentence, David Lodge has written a quietly brilliant anti-comedy about the mirthless business of ageing. If its ultimate interest is in the full stop at the end of the sentence, it also shows that there are many things to detain us, both good and bad, in our progress towards it.